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Practice, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Sandra Thom-Jones would replace the job interview with a paid trial day
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, the researcher set out how recruitment shuts out autistic candidates, and an audience member described a company that hires through a 30 minute task instead.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Sandra Thom-Jones ended her advice on recruiting autistic people with a suggestion that employers skip the interview altogether. Ideally, she told the employment panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in June 2024, an employer would not interview the person at all. She would invite the applicant in, show them the job, ask them to do it for a day or half a day, and pay them for the work. She said she could guarantee that this one step alone would see employers hire many more autistic people, because they would come in and do a better job than most.
The question came from Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session. He told the panel that the Australian HR Institute had found that, as he recalled it, something over 84 per cent of HR professionals wanted more diversity, inclusion and accommodations in their workplaces but did not know how to achieve them. Thom-Jones said she was writing a chapter of her book on exactly this subject, and set out the process from the first step.
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Sources the story draws on
- The State of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Australian Workplaces (opens in a new tab), Australian HR Institute
- Ameliorating the Disadvantage for Autistic Job Seekers: An Initial Evaluation of Adapted Employment Interview Questions (opens in a new tab), Autism, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 1060 to 1075; University of Bath research portal record
- Autistics at Work: A Practical Guide (opens in a new tab), Melbourne University Publishing
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