Live: Hiring for Cognitive Diversity in Tech
taught by: Lē Silveus McNamara
Session Summary
Hiring neurodiverse technologists can benefit your IT teams!
Hiring for Cognitive Diversity in Tech strives to help companies and hiring managers understand the best hiring and interview practices to access qualified candidates who may learn and interact differently, candidates who may be inadvertently falling through the cracks of the current hiring and interview norms.
Description
Watch this presentation in the Knowbility Learning Center
Twenty technologists who identify as neurodiverse came forward, during last year's Deque’s AxeCon hackathon event, to share and record their experiences with the hiring process in tech. This talk and panel discussion will cover the common threads of those disclosures, the value of neurodivergent team members, and the experiences positive and negative that neurodivergent applicants face in looking for work within the tech sector and for technology roles in other industries.
We'll be sharing what in the interview processes triggered negative outcomes and what behaviors and processes facilitated positive outcomes. We'll be making suggestions for changes hiring professionals can make as well as accommodations that can be asked for and should be expected. We'll also be talking about how to reach out to neurodiverse talent directly, to get back those that have given up, by working directly with services and communities.
In the latter half of this session attendees with have a chance to user test their interview processes and ask questions of a panel of neurodivergent technologists.
Practical Skills
- Participants will built empathy by learning how those who identify as neurodivergent experience ourselves and what our differences have meant for us in our technology careers and our job seeking journey’s in particular.
- Participants will learn the ways in which we SHINE in the workforce and why their teams needs us as much as we need them.
- Participants will learn what is not working in the current interview processes and why and more importantly what they can do instead to court and hire cognitively diverse talent.