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Meet John. He’s a wizard at data analytics. His combination of mathematical ability & software development skill is highly unusual. His CV features two master’s degrees, both with honors. An obvious guy for a tech company to scoop up, right?

Until recently, no. Before John ran across a firm that had begun experimenting with alternative approaches khổng lồ talent, he was unemployed for more than two years. Other companies he had talked with badly needed the skills he possessed. But he couldn’t make it through the hiring process.

If you watched John for a while, you’d start to lớn see why. He seems, well, different. He wears headphones all the time, & when people talk to him, he doesn’t look right at them. He leans over every 10 minutes or so to tighten his shoelaces; he can’t concentrate when they’re loose. When they’re tight, though, John is the department’s most productive employee. He is hardworking và never wants to take breaks. Although his assigned workplace “buddy” has finally persuaded him to vì chưng so, he doesn’t enjoy them.

“John” is a composite of people whose privacy we wanted to lớn protect—people with autism spectrum disorder. He is representative of participants in the programs of pioneering companies that have begun seeking out “neurodiverse” talent.

A lot of people are lượt thích John. The incidence of autism in the United States is now 1 in 42 among boys & 1 in 189 among girls, according khổng lồ the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And although corporate programs have so far focused primarily on autistic people, it should be possible to lớn extend them khổng lồ people affected by dyspraxia (a neurologically based physical disorder), dyslexia, ADHD, social anxiety disorders, and other conditions. Many people with these disorders have higher-than-average abilities; research shows that some conditions, including autism và dyslexia, can bestow special skills in pattern recognition, memory, or mathematics. Yet those affected often struggle to lớn fit the profiles sought by prospective employers.

Neurodiverse people frequently need workplace accommodations, such as headphones to prevent auditory overstimulation, to activate or maximally leverage their abilities. Sometimes they exhibit challenging eccentricities. In many cases the accommodations and challenges are manageable và the potential returns are great. But to lớn realize the benefits, most companies would have to adjust their recruitment, selection, and career development policies to lớn reflect a broader definition of talent.

A growing number of prominent companies have reformed their HR processes in order lớn access neurodiverse talent; among them are SAP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Microsoft, Willis Towers Watson, Ford, and EY. Many others, including Caterpillar, Dell Technologies, Deloitte, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, & UBS, have start-up or exploratory efforts under way. We have had extensive access to the neurodiversity programs at SAP, HPE, and Specialisterne (the Danish consulting company that originated such programs) & have also interacted with people at Microsoft, Willis Towers Watson, & EY.

Although the programs are still in early days—SAP’s, the longest running among major companies, is just four years old—managers say they are already paying off in ways far beyond reputational enhancement. Those ways include productivity gains, quality improvement, boosts in innovative capabilities, và broad increases in employee engagement. Nick Wilson, the managing director of HPE South Pacific—an organization with one of the largest such programs—says that no other initiative in his company delivers benefits at so many levels.

Perhaps the most surprising benefit is that managers have begun thinking more deeply about leveraging the talents of all employees through greater sensitivity khổng lồ individual needs. SAP’s program “forces you to get to lớn know the person better, so you know how to manage them,” says Silvio Bessa, the senior vice president of digital business services. “It’s made me a better manager, without a doubt.”

Why Neurodiversity Presents Opportunities

“Neurodiversity is the idea that neurological differences like autism and ADHD are the result of normal, natural variation in the human genome,” John Elder Robison, a scholar in residence and a cochair of the Neurodiversity Working Group at the College of William và Mary, writes in a blog on Psychology Today’s website. Robison, who himself has Asperger’s syndrome, adds, “Indeed, many individuals who embrace the concept of neurodiversity believe that people with differences do not need lớn be cured; they need help & accommodation instead.” We couldn’t agree more.

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Everyone is to some extent differently abled (an expression favored by many neurodiverse people), because we are all born different & raised differently. Our ways of thinking result from both our inherent “machinery” & the experiences that have “programmed” us.

Most managers are familiar with the advantages organizations can gain from diversity in the backgrounds, disciplinary training, gender, culture, và other individual qualities of employees. Benefits from neurodiversity are similar but more direct. Because neurodiverse people are wired differently from “neurotypical” people, they may bring new perspectives lớn a company’s efforts lớn create or recognize value. At HPE, neurodiverse software testers observed that one client’s projects always seemed lớn go into crisis mode before a launch. Intolerant of disorder, they strenuously questioned the company’s apparent acceptance of the chaos. This led the client company to lớn realize that it had indeed become too tolerant of these crises and, with the help of the testers, to successfully redesign the launch process. At SAP, a neurodiverse customer-support analyst spotted an opportunity khổng lồ let customers help solve a common problem themselves; thousands of them subsequently used the resources he created.

Nevertheless, the neurodiverse population remains a largely untapped talent pool. Unemployment runs as high as 80% (this figure includes people with more-severe disorders, who are not candidates for neurodiversity programs). When they are working, even highly capable neurodiverse people are often underemployed. Program participants told us story after story of how, despite having solid credentials, they had previously had lớn settle for the kinds of jobs many people leave behind in high school. When SAP began its Autism at Work program, applicants included people with master’s degrees in electrical engineering, biostatistics, economic statistics, và anthropology & bachelor’s degrees in computer science, applied & computational mathematics, electrical engineering, & engineering physics. Some had dual degrees. Many had earned very high grades & graduated with honors or other distinctions. One held a patent.

Not surprisingly, when autistic people with those sorts of credentials bởi vì manage to get hired, many turn out lớn be capable, & some are really great. Over the past two years HPE’s program has placed more than 30 participants in software-testing roles at Australia’s Department of Human Services (DHS). Preliminary results suggest that the organization’s neurodiverse testing teams are 30% more productive than the others.

Inspired by the successes at DHS, the Australian Defense Department is now working with HPE khổng lồ develop a neurodiversity program in cybersecurity; participants will apply their superior pattern-detection abilities lớn tasks such as examining logs và other sources of messy data for signs of intrusion or attack. Using assessment methods borrowed from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), it has found candidates whose relevant abilities are “off the charts.” (The IDF’s Special Intelligence Unit 9900, which is responsible for analyzing aerial và satellite imagery, has a group staffed primarily with people on the autism spectrum. It has proved that they can spot patterns others bởi not see.)

The case for neurodiverse hiring is especially compelling given the skills shortages that increasingly afflict technology & other industries. For example, the European Union faces a shortage of 800,000 IT workers by 2020, according khổng lồ a European Commission study. The biggest deficits are expected to lớn be in strategically important và rapidly expanding areas such as data analytics và IT services implementation, whose tasks are a good match with the abilities of some neurodiverse people.

Why Companies Don’t Tap Neurodiverse Talent

What has kept so many companies from taking on people with the skills they badly need? It comes down lớn the way they find and recruit talent và decide whom lớn hire (and promote).

Especially in large companies, HR processes are developed with an eye toward wide application across the organization. But there is a conflict between scalability & the goal of acquiring neurodiverse talent. “SAP focuses on having scalable HR processes; however, if we were to lớn use the same processes for everyone, we would miss people with autism,” says Anka Wittenberg, the company’s chief diversity & inclusion officer.

In addition, the behaviors of many neurodiverse people run counter to common notions of what makes a good employee—solid communication skills, being a team player, emotional intelligence, persuasiveness, salesperson-type personalities, the ability lớn network, the ability lớn conform lớn standard practices without special accommodations, and so on. These criteria systematically screen out neurodiverse people.

But they are not the only way to lớn provide value. In fact, in recent decades the ability to compete on the basis of innovation has become more crucial for many companies. Innovation calls on firms to địa chỉ cửa hàng variety lớn the mix—to include people and ideas from “the edges,” as SAP put it in the press release announcing its program. Having people who see things differently & who maybe don’t fit in seamlessly “helps offset our tendency, as a big company, to all look in the same direction,” Bessa says.

You might think that organizations could simply seek more variety in prospective employees while retaining their traditional recruiting, hiring, and development practices. Many have taken that approach: Their managers still work top down from strategies lớn capabilities needed, translating those into organizational roles, job descriptions, and recruiting checklists. But two big problems cause them to lớn miss neurodiverse talent.

The first involves a practice that is almost universal under the traditional approach: interviewing. Although neurodiverse people may excel in important areas, many don’t interview well. For example, autistic people often don’t make good eye contact, are prone lớn conversational tangents, and can be overly honest about their weaknesses. Some have confidence problems arising from difficulties they experienced in previous interview situations. Neurodiverse people more broadly are unlikely lớn earn higher scores in interviews than less-talented neurotypical candidates. SAP & HPE have found that it can take weeks or months to discover how good some program participants are (or, equally important, where their limitations lie). Fortunately, as we’ll see, interviews are not the only way to assess a candidate’s suitability.

The second problem, especially common in large companies, derives from the assumption that scalable processes require absolute conformity to lớn standardized approaches. As mentioned, employees in neurodiversity programs typically need khổng lồ be allowed to deviate from established practices. This shifts a manager’s orientation from assuring compliance through standardization to adjusting individual work contexts. Most accommodations, such as installing different lighting and providing noise-canceling headphones, are not very expensive. But they bởi require managers to lớn tailor individual work settings more than they otherwise might.

How Pioneers Are Changing The Talent Management Game

The tech industry has a history of hiring oddballs. The talented nerd who lacks social graces has become a cultural icon, as much a part of the industry mythos as the company that starts in a garage. In his book NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman points out that the incidence of autism is particularly high in places lượt thích Silicon Valley (for reasons not completely understood). He và others have hypothesized that many of the industry’s “oddballs” and “nerds” might well have been “on the spectrum,” although undiagnosed. Hiring for neurodiversity, then, could be seen as an extension of the tendencies of a culture that recognizes the value of nerds.