The Neurodivergent Job Candidate: Recruiting Autistic Professionals - Paperback

by Marcia Scheiner (Author), Joan Bogden (Author)

This book provides guidance on recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding practices that will allow employers to successfully hire neurodivergent professionals into inclusive, competitive employment.

Today, 35% of 18-year-olds with an autism spectrum diagnosis attend college, yet they have a 75-85% under-employment and unemployment rate after graduation. While organizations are looking to expand their diversity and inclusion hiring efforts to include neurodivergent professionals, current recruiting and interviewing practices in general are not well-suited to this. With over one-third of the US population identifying as neurodivergent, employers need to address how to attract this talent pool to take advantage of a meaningful segment of the workforce. Readers of this book will gain an understanding of how to guide their organizations through the creation of recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding processes tailored to neurodivergent professionals in any field.

Written by authors with extensive experience working in the corporate world and consulting with Fortune 1000 companies on autism hiring efforts, this book is targeted at employers, acknowledging their perspective. Structured as a reference guide for busy recruiters, hiring managers, and supervisors, this book can be read in its entirety, in relevant sections as needed, or used as a refresher whenever necessary. This book also provides a background on the thinking styles of autistic individuals, giving the reader a deeper understanding of how to best support neurodivergent jobseekers.

Author Biography

Marcia Scheiner is the President and Founder of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors (Integrate), co-author of An Employer's Guide to Managing Professionals on the Autism Spectrum (2017), and frequent speaker on autism employment. Prior to founding Integrate in 2010, Ms. Scheiner held senior management positions in the financial services industry. Ms. Scheiner is a graduate of Wellesley College, Massachusetts and has an MBA from Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, New York. She is the parent of an adult son with autism.

Tracy Powell-Rudy is a contributing author of this book.

Joan Bogden is a Content and Media Training Coach and the President of Blonde 'n Blue Productions, as well as the co-author of An Employer's Guide to Managing Professionals on the Autism Spectrum (2017). She has over 30 years of experience in the communications and training industry and has a BA in psychology from Vassar College. Ms. Bogden received an MA in clinical psychology from Fordham University, where she was also a published researcher and a doctoral candidate in that field.