I published three interviews in October to mark National Disability Employment Awareness month. What particularly struck me was the amount of work going into neurodiversity hiring, and I want to dive deeper by finding out how specific employers are developing their programs.
My guest this week is Neil Barnett, Director, Inclusive Hiring and Accessibility at Microsoft. Neil helped to develop Microsoft’s Neurodiversity Hiring Program, which has been in place since 2015. He has excellent insights and valuable advice for employers looking to establish similar programs.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Are employers getting any better at disability inclusion?
• The story behind Microsoft’s Neurodiversity Hiring Program
• Screening in rather than screening out
• Changing the hiring process to set people up for success
• Providing tangible feedback
• How the success of the program has changed aspects of Microsoft’s other hiring programs
• Building an inclusive workplace
• Non-apparent disability and self-disclosure
• ERGs and growing internal communities
• Building the business case to get started
• How Microsoft collaborates with other employers
• Advice for parents on the future of neurodiversity in the workforce
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Hired (0s):
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Hired (48s):
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Matt Alder (Intro) (1m 19s):
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 479 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I published three interviews in October to mark National Disability Employment Awareness month. What particularly struck me was the amount of work going into neurodiversity hiring, and I want to dive deeper by finding out how specific employers are developing their programs. My guest this week is Neil Barnett, Director, Inclusive Hiring and Accessibility at Microsoft. Neil helped to develop Microsoft’s Neurodiversity Hiring Program, which has been in place since 2015.
Matt Alder (Intro) (2m 1s):
He has excellent insights and valuable advice for employers looking to establish similar programs.
Matt Alder (2m 10s):
Hi Neil and welcome to the podcast.
Neil Barnett (2m 12s):
Hey, great. Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Alder (2m 14s):
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Neil Barnett (2m 21s):
So, my name’s Neil Barnett. I’m a Director of Accessibility at Microsoft. I spend most of my day working on Disability inclusion and hiring people with disabilities at the company. I started our Neurodiversity Hiring Program back in 2015, and I’m very passionate about this topic. And I work with employers all across the world to try to start similar programs.
Matt Alder (2m 43s):
Fantastic stuff. And I really wanna sort of get into the details of that in a second. But before we do, I suppose by way of context, keen to get your thoughts on where we are with everything at the moment. I mean, do you think that employers are getting better or at least more aware when it comes to recruiting and retaining people with disabilities?
Neil Barnett (3m 5s):
Yeah, I would say it’s a journey and I think I’ve seen employers are at all stages of the journey. Overall, I think more and more employers are leaning into this space and thinking about what they can do to attract disability talent. And disability is talent, as well as thinking about once they hire people with disabilities into the organization. What does the support structure look like? How can they best ensure everyone’s successful? And so I think more and more employers are focusing on this dimension A, but it’s an area that I think there’s a lot of opportunity.
Matt Alder (3m 39s):
Absolutely. What advantages are the employers who are doing this really well getting?
Neil Barnett (3m 46s):
Well, employers that are doing this one, I think they’re finding tremendous talent base that we always talk about untapped talent, but clearly, there’s a community of job seekers out there that are getting screened out versus screened in to the recruitment process. And so, I mean, I just look at Microsoft through some of our ability hiring and our neurodiversity hiring. We’re finding job candidates that we may not have seen through that traditional HR process where imagine if someone couldn’t get through a traditional phone screen where if someone’s resume didn’t have certain keywords. So by kind of screening in, I think job employers are finding just tremendous talent that otherwise they would not seen.
Neil Barnett (4m 30s):
And then the other thing I’ve really seen is that employers are just, there are a lot of people with disabilities at your company are ready. And so they’re seeing their employees raise their hand and say, “Hey, this is so great that you’re focused on this area now. Can you come train my team? Can you, how do I get an accommodation? What resources are available for me?” So, it’s really lit up the entire culture of an employer base, not just the hiring arm.
Matt Alder (4m 56s):
You mentioned that you help set up Microsoft’s s Neurodiversity Hiring program. Tell us this story behind that and how that came about and how you did it.
Neil Barnett (5m 5s):
Yeah, so I guess it’s 2015 now, so it’s a few years ago. We, at Microsoft, we’ve always hired people with disabilities at the core of our company. And we know that by hiring people with disabilities, you can improve your products, your services, your websites. Just having people with disabilities in the DNA of your company, it’s just tremendous benefit that ripple out across all parts of your business. And in 2015, we started looking at autism in particular and thought, “Hey, you know, we have a lot of autistic employees at Microsoft already. What more could we do?” And so this was very, on early 2015, there were only one or two large employers that were having corporate autism hiring programs.
Neil Barnett (5m 50s):
DXC Technologies, which I believe is now HPE, and then of course SAP. And so we said, “Hey, let us try to figure out ourselves as a technology company what we could do. And we did a pilot back in 2015 broadened partners to help us figure it out. And we were just blown away with the talent that we found and the feedback that we were guiding from managers. And so we’ve just taken it from there.
Matt Alder (6m 17s):
And tell us a little bit about how it works. You sort of mentioned earlier In our conversation about screening people in rather than screening people out. What differences have you made to your hiring process to make this work?
Neil Barnett (6m 31s):
Great question. So in most employers, a typical interview for a job seeker is one day, usually back-to-back interviews. Pre-pandemic, you would fly to an employer, to a corporate headquarters interview all day long, very stressful interview back to back to back, and then you would get back on a plane and go home potentially. So now everything’s remote, of course, in the new world. But even before this program, it is a multi-day event. So think of it as like a nine-to-three event, right? So it’s not all packed into one day. Where the first day you get to know the hiring team, you get to know actually the people that you’re interviewing with and against, which is different.
Neil Barnett (7m 14s):
And we as an employer really get to know you. We do activities, we do team building activities to kind of break the ice and let you kind of feel comfortable so you can show your skills and your talents. And then as we go through that multi-day, three, four-day event, we actually have the traditional interview on the last day, but there’s more time between the interviews. We’ve done some prep, we’ve done mock interviews before, and so we’re really trying to set the job seeker up for success and at the same time give them something tangible so they don’t get a job. They’ve got some tangible feedback that they can use for the next opportunity.
Matt Alder (7m 58s):
Working like that, have any of the sort of the findings, the learnings that you’ve taken from that influenced your kind of broader, your other hiring processes?
Neil Barnett (8m 7s):
Absolutely, and I think that is, when I talk to employers. That’s the golden nugget is if you can find the red threads from doing these lighthouse projects and bring them back across your entire enterprise. That it’s not easy, but that’s how you have true impact. And so a couple examples for us would be in our Neurodiversity Hiring Program, we focused a lot on once hired providing support with job coaches, often third-party job coaches. Well, this is something that our entire employee base. Like I mentioned earlier, we’ve got a lot of neurodivergent employees saw and they’re like, “Hey, how can I tap into these executive functioning job coaches? And so we brought that process across, or we would, for our program, since we knew we were hiring folks that were on the autism spectrum, initially, we would bring in a third party professor to teach about autism strength, autism culture, kind of demystify autism to hiring managers.
Neil Barnett (9m 1s):
Well we do that now for other disability segments. We could bring in the lighthouse for the blind here in the United States if a job seeker was blind or low vision. So we’ll partner to bring in disability experts to train the broader teams, the windows, the offices, the Xbox of the world on disability. So there are a lot of like red threads that we’re trying to pull back across the organization to have true impact in scale.
Matt Alder (9m 29s):
I suppose leading on from that, and just digging a bit deeper into building an inclusive workplace. How do you make sure that the people you hired kind of have ongoing support so they really feel part of the company and they can really thrive as an employee?
Neil Barnett (9m 47s):
Great, great question. This is an ongoing thing that we work really hard at Microsoft and I know all employers do. I think, you know, once hired, first of all, an employee is always optional to choose to self-identify or self-disclose. So many people with disabilities over 70 to 80% are non-apparent or invisible. And so if an employee chooses to self-disclose that they have a disability, there are many different avenues, right at a company in particular at Microsoft, we really try to signposts to make sure employees know through HR where to get accommodations and typical accommodations are so that they can be productive in the workforce.
Neil Barnett (10m 29s):
We spend a lot of time on training for managers from HR staff on Disability etiquette, Disability inclusion. We try to provide resources for managers on career development, employees on career development. We have a very big employee resource group ERG. A Disability ERG that we actually have over 20 chapters under that. So vision, mobility, cognitive, neurodiversity, ALS. So we really try to tap into that community aand grow that community. So there are a lot of systems that we put in place to try to build that culture and ensure that the employee’s set up for success. But you know, it is a definitely an ongoing piece that we’re always open to feedback and trying to figure out what more we can do.
Matt Alder (11m 14s):
You mentioned that you talked to a lot of employers around the world and share some of your learnings. Tell us more about how you sort of collaborate together.
Neil Barnett (11m 24s):
Yeah, so one of the things back in 2017, Microsoft SAP, EY and JP Morgan Chase, we started a roundtable of employers. It’s called the Neurodiversity at Work Employer Roundtable. And if you go to Bing or Google, you can search it. There are over 50 employers now, many large enterprise companies are there that you’ll recognize. Chevron, Ford, Deloitte, and all these companies have proactive inclusive hiring programs around Neurodiversity. But one of the tenets of joining the round table is that we work with other employers that are interested in doing something similar.
Neil Barnett (12m 7s):
So, mostly it’s around helping with the business case. Most employers are like, “Hey, I think this is a good idea. I see what’s going on in the industry, but I’m not sure who to partner with. What’s the ROI? What are my first steps? And so, you know, myself and a few others, we spend time with these employers trying to work through.” Understanding that each company, each culture is different. It’s not the Microsoft Y or the EY way, it’s your way. But we try to provide real tangible examples and feedback and help these companies start their programs, but again with partners. But that’s how we connect with a lot of employers around the world.
Matt Alder (12m 46s):
Employers who are listening, who really want to move forward with this and accelerate what they’re doing. What’s some sort of getting started advice that you could give?
Neil Barnett (12m 56s):
Yeah, so I think if, if you’re interested in this one, there’s just a lot of information out there already online. As I mentioned, there’s been so many employers that have started this. I think, you know, first I would say is make that first step. I think a lot of times employers think they have to have everything in place to start a program. Clearly, you need to be thinking about what does support look like not just hiring? But what does my employee experience look like today for people with disabilities? You know, can they get an accommodation? Do we do manager training and readiness? Some basic tenants. But I think to start a Neurodiversity Hiring Program – one, there’s a whole ecosystem of service providers out there that have frameworks that you can leverage and use.
Neil Barnett (13m 38s):
Two, as part of the round table I just mentioned, we put out a playbook, a getting started playbook written by EY, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, and SAP. That kind of lay out just the core elements of starting an enterprise program. So I would say to these employers, there’s just a lot of help and support you don’t need to know everything to get started, but I think just moving forward is the best advice.
Matt Alder (14m 2s):
And where can people find the Playbook?
Neil Barnett (14m 4s):
So the playbook is at the Disability in website, if you bing Disability in under resources for Neurodiversity, you’ll see the playbook.
Matt Alder (14m 15s):
So, I always like to finish by asking a question about the future. And I wanna ask you a question about the future, but perhaps in a slightly different context to what I do normally. So, particularly when it comes to Neurodiversity because there’s more understanding and the understanding of people’s brain has improved, brains has improved. There are obviously more children and teenagers who are being diagnosed as being neurodivergent than there were in the past. I know that there will be parents listening who have children who are neurodiverse. What do you think the future looks like in terms of careers and support and how should they be thinking and advising their kids right now?
Neil Barnett (15m 0s):
I talk to a lot of parents all the time and family members and this is a, a topic that comes up often. One, I think the future, as we’ve seen over the last, you know, five to 10 years, the good news is more and more employers are seeing this as an opportunity, as a talent play, as untapped talent that they’ve been missing out. I think that employers and I talk to employers all the time, I really wanna stress that it’s not just about STEM roles. You know, there’s a lot of interest and news around technology and as a technology company, I totally understand that. But I think as more employers can diversify the role types. It can be customer service, it can be marketing, it could be financed, it could be manufacturing.
Neil Barnett (15m 44s):
I think that’s what needs to happen because not everyone is gonna be a coder or a tester. And so I think the future is more and more enterprise companies are going to diversify the role types. And then you’ll see more and more small and mid-size businesses, which is where the majority of employment happens, is that at that SMB level are starting now to think about, “Okay, what does this mean for me? I’m not a large enterprise with a large HR or employee resource group. How do I do it as a bakery, as a line manufacturer?” And that’s the next wave that we’re starting to see.
Matt Alder (16m 19s):
Neil, thank you very much for talking to me.
Neil Barnett (16m 23s):
Appreciate it. Thanks again.
Matt Alder (16m 24s):
My thanks to Neil. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram where you can find us by searching for Recruiting Future and TikTok where you can find us by searching for Recruiting Future pod. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the new monthly podcast newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening.
Matt Alder (17m 5s):
I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
