One LLP is putting neurodiversity at the heart of their business and hiring with a dedicated focus on people who learn and think differently.
This week, multinational professional services network Ernst & Young announced the opening of their sixth Neurodiverse Center of Excellence in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s a hub of neurodiverse talent designed to apply the unique skills and methodologies of people who learn and think differently to meet client’s business needs. It’s opening with a founding team of ten, with cognitive differences such as dyslexia, ADHD, autism and Asperger syndrome, joining Ernst & Young’s client teams of almost 2,300 in the Greater Boston area working in fields such as cybersecurity, tax and assurance.
The world of business for people with neurodiversities can be a difficult one. Although there’s a lot of data to suggest that people who have neurodiverse brains excel in a business world (over a quarter of CEOs are thought to have dyslexia, as opposed to only 10-15% of the world population), many people find the prospect daunting, and many businesses still hire an overwhelming predominance of neurotypical candidates. It’s estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that up to 85% of adults with autism are unemployed or underemployed; a shocking figure when we consider that we find similar employment data across many forms of neurodiversity.
The Neurodiverse Centers for Excellence programme is part of Ernst & Young’s ongoing commitment to neurodiversity within their organisation, and represent a welcome paradigm shift in the way that businesses might view people with neurodiversities. Over the past five years, Ernst and Young in the US have also optimised their hiring process to be fairer and more inclusive for people with cognitive differences, switching from an interview behaviour-based assessment system to one that analyses a candidate’s performance in a prospective role to determine their suitability for a position.
Although Ernst & Young only opened their first Neurodiverse Center for Excellence in Philadelphia in 2016, they’ve expanded into five other cities in the US, as well as creating similar hubs in Canada and India. There are also plans to open centers in South America, Asia-Pacific and Europe, to truly explore what neurodiverse talent can do on a global scale.
There’s more about Ernst & Young’s ideas about neurodiverse workforces here, and we’d love to see more organisations of a similar scale putting talent with cognitive differences at the center of their business world.