Talking to people can be difficult for Rishabh Birla, but his last job demanded he did a lot of it. He has autism and finds making eye contact uncomfortable. For Birla, the rules of conversation are puzzling and he sometimes veers off course, alarming the other person.
A 25-year-old postgraduate, Birla had been working at a cosmetics startup in Thane, not far from Mumbai. “The job involved communicating with different clients to keep track of their orders. It was exhausting to interact with so people every day,” he says.
When he heard last year that Ernst & Young (EY) was recruiting people with autism, learning disabilities, dyspraxia, Asperger’s syndrome and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to their Mumbai office, he applied. His decision was based more on wanting to experience a corporate recruitment process than any real expectation of securing a job, he says.
After a specially designed process broken down into stages and spread over two months, Birla was offered a job as an analyst. “My family and I were elated. This is a major milestone in my life personally and professionally,” he says.
The job offers to Birla and four others from a shortlist of 13 candidates is part of EY’s new initiative on neurodiversity, an umbrella term that refers to variations in neurocognitive functioning.
Since EY pioneered recruitment of a neurodiverse workforce at its Philadelphia, US office in 2016, it has become more widely accepted within the company that neurodivergent individuals often have specialised contributions to make in the workplace, particularly in the booming sectors of artificial intelligence, robotics and process automation.
Recruiting neurodivergent people is not about corporate social responsibility, but a business imperative.
“We see a clear role for neurodiverse candidates in these areas,” says Amarpal Chadha, partner at EY’s People Advisory Services. “These individuals are often technologically inclined and detail-oriented, with strong skills in analytics, mathematics, pattern recognition and information processing – among the very skills businesses most urgently need.”
When the impact of the first neurodivergent recruits to the Philadelphia office was assessed, their efficiency and productivity were comparable to those of other employees. But they were much better at innovation. One group identified improvements that cut the time for technical training in half, automating processes much more quickly.
In one project, the perspective brought by a neurodiverse team was estimated to save 800 hours. In another, the combined time savings and quality improvements generated around $100,000 (£73,000) in cost savings. Projects expected to take up to five weeks were finished in three days.
EY India adapted every step of the recruitment process to match the needs of neurodivergent candidates and gauge their potential. Informal and unscripted chats replaced a standard interview, allowing candidates to demonstrate their abilities in a more relaxed setting and over a longer period of time. At every stage, the process was paused to ensure a question had been understood. If not, it was rephrased. Instructions were given in clear, straightforward language.
“The normal recruitment process here takes about a week – a series of interviews, including one with HR, one with the technical team and another with a partner,” Chadha says. “This had to be slowed right down. Each interview had to be broken up into segments to give candidates enough time to absorb and reflect. The process of hiring took two months instead of a week.”
EY changed its technical assessment. “Instead of determining what specific knowledge and skills [candidates] had, we switched to broadly discovering how strong their aptitude was for learning new things,” Chadha says.
Birla said he appreciated the extent to which the process had been customised. “It was supportive and patient. I felt EY understood my needs and heard my views as a neurodivergent person,” he says.
According to the World Health Organization, one in 160 children globally have an autism spectrum disorder, and disproportionately high numbers of adults are unemployed. Action for Autism estimates that 18 million Indians are on the autistic spectrum, and jobs for this group are hard to come by.
“The effort can collapse at the first hurdle – the interview. But we are working with some large companies and multinationals to encourage and support them in finding roles and we’re seeing progress,” says Preeti Siwach of Action for Autism.
She helped Pardeep Sharma, who has autism, to find work in housekeeping at a hotel chain. “He is a school leaver and I never expected him to get a job. If only more companies would realise that people with autism have something to offer. They can learn [and] they deserve an opportunity,” says his father, Sunil Sharma.
Chadha says he has found that some of EY’s clients are intrigued by the new initative. “Among our clients, in their own families they know of someone, a relative or a friend, with autism. They were keen to understand our policy and some have started replicating it,” he says.
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