Next in Human Resources: Seeing cognitive diversity as an asset to build on, not a problem to avoid

Neu­ro­di­ver­si­ty: The Ben­e­fits of Recruit­ing Employ­ees with Cog­ni­tive Dis­abil­i­ties (Har­vard Busi­ness School’s Work­ing Knowledge):

There’s a new fron­tier in diver­si­ty pro­grams focused not on race or gen­der but on cog­ni­tive ability.

The grow­ing inter­est in neurodiversity—hiring peo­ple with cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties like Autism Spec­trum Dis­or­der (ASD)—is moti­vat­ed by com­pa­nies look­ing to tap into a large­ly unno­ticed labor pool at a time when many bemoan the lack of skilled workers…

Social dif­fi­cul­ties are one of the hall­marks of ASD, mak­ing it hard for those with ASD to make it through a tra­di­tion­al hir­ing process. Rough­ly 60 per­cent of peo­ple with ASD have aver­age or above aver­age intel­li­gence, yet 85 per­cent are unemployed.

“Their intel­lec­tu­al horse­pow­er is quite high,” Har­vard Busi­ness School’s Gary P. Pisano says of the ASD pop­u­la­tion. “They do things dif­fer­ent­ly and they behave dif­fer­ent­ly, but the ques­tion is, can you turn that into a virtue? That’s part of the think­ing on this idea of neu­ro­di­ver­si­ty; that we do bet­ter when we mix peo­ple who think dif­fer­ent­ly or are wired a bit differently.”

To learn more:

• The Sur­pris­ing Right Fit for Soft­ware Testing
• Study: Are neu­ro­mark­ers on the cusp of trans­form­ing edu­ca­tion and men­tal health?