Second Day of Autism at Work Summit

We started the day off with a presentation by Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft, who spoke at length of the program at Microsoft. Then Dr. Robert Austin introduced the autism hiring managers from several different companies such as SAP, Microsoft, E&Y, JPMC, DXC and Ford. Each company rep spoke of their hiring process for autism hiring or how their existing hiring process has changed to accommodate people on the spectrum. Generally, each company has a screening or first contact, an assessment phase, then a decision to hire. Some companies have special hiring programs where they hire a few people in one shot using specific advertising or sourcing campaigns, others modify their hiring portals and have boxes that candidates can check to indicate they have a disability or that they need accommodations in hiring. In the later case, no one asks what their condition is, but instead the recruiter asks what accommodation is needed. It could be "more time to answer questions" or "I don't look people in the eye"  for a person with autism, or "I need a sign-language interpreter" for a deaf person.

Assessment phases can take a few hours or up to six weeks, depending on the employer, the jobs, the education and experience of the candidates, and the scope of the hiring effort. If a company is looking for people to do manual labor, e.g., the interview might consider of a few hours of task-based evaluations where management and staff review the performance of a candidate. If a company wants to hire people with a desire to be programmers but little practical experience - and perhaps even little traditional education - assessments can be weeks long with individual and team challenges and company-specific task assessments. Candidates in programs like this could earn stipends from the state they live in. Those who are not selected get constructive feedback on why they were not selected, help with resume building, and often a certificate or a line on their resume that says they went through the assessment as training.

A keynote address was given by Nick Walker, managing editor of Autonomous Press. Mr. Walker emphasized that one of the keys to developing the full potential of autistic employees is to look beyond stereotypes that limit our ideas of what these people can do in jobs - do we take the well-meaning but misguided attitude that they are all only good at math or counting tooth picks like Rain Man, or the demeaning attitude that they can only do rote work or worse? These attitudes have been challenged by the aforementioned employers, and hiring mangers are finding that autistic people can do just about anything the rest of us allegedly "normal" people can do - graphic arts, animation, manufacturing, call center work, programming, QA, project management, technical writing, web design, editing...you name it.

The rest of the day built on these ideas and panel speakers from each of these companies and related NGOs or state agencies spoke of their experiences in the process. There were three tracks that the attendees could choose from (see the schedule here and register to watch via livestream here) during each afternoon session - Imagination tracks, in which planning for a hiring program was emphasized and assisted by experienced speakers; Ideation tracks, in which attendees heard from the experiences of first-time practitioners (I will be speaking on one 26th April at 10:30AM PDT); and Collaboration tracks that discussed how to scale operations.

I was unable to attend a good chunk of the afternoon because I had to catch up with my day job, but I was able to join an ideation track about creating accessible interviews, which I detailed in the second paragraph, above.

At the end of the day there was a closing session about the Autism At Work Roundtable. Companies who comprise this roundtable have had at least one year of experience with autism hiring and have agreed to work together to share experiences and best practices. These are companies that are, in some cases, competitors, getting together to collaborate. I can't emphasize this enough - everyone at these events since 2016 feels that strongly about how important this issue is that they feel obligated to evangelize about it. It's a great experience.