The Best Person I Ever Worked with Almost Didn’t Get Hired

Firms compete hard for analytical minds, yet a standard interview can filter much of that neurodivergent talent out, rewarding a confident performance over the ability to do the work.

Years ago I was involved in a graduate hiring round. One candidate had the strongest technical scores in the cohort by a distance. In the competency interview, she barely made eye contact, gave answers that were either too literal or wandered off down some tangent, and visibly struggled when a panellist changed the question halfway through. Two of the three interviewers wanted to reject her. The phrases they used were “not client-ready” and “no presence.” 

She was hired, narrowly, because one director pushed. Within eighteen months she was the person the team relied on to find the error nobody else could see, the one who read the whole data set and noticed the single inconsistent figure on the last page. The “no presence” candidate became the quiet backbone of the practice. She’d been diagnosed with autism in her late twenties, years after the school system and two earlier employers had simply written her off as “difficult.” 

What almost cost the business that talent wasn’t her ability. It was an interview designed to reward a particular performance of confidence and a culture that mistook the performance for the substance. 

How Much Neurodivergent Talent Are Firms Missing?

Somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of people are neurodivergent a category that includes autism, ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome, dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia. That’s a meaningful slice of any talent pool, and a slice that professional services, with its premium on analytical thinking, pattern recognition and deep focus, is unusually well placed to benefit from. 

And yet. The employment figures are not a near-miss; they’re a chasm. According to the Office for National Statistics, just 21.7 percent of autistic people in the UK are in any form of employment the lowest rate of any disability group, against around 52 percent for disabled people overall and 81 percent for non-disabled people. The government’s 2024 Buckland Review of Autism Employment put it at roughly three in ten working-age autistic people in work, and described autistic people as an “untapped workforce” whose analytical and problem-solving strengths employers are simply failing to reach. There are signs of progress: by 2024/25 the autism employment rate had risen to around 34 percent, against 55.3 percent for disabled people overall and 82 percent for non-disabled people. That movement is welcome, but it remains the widest employment gap of any disability group, so the work is far from done. 

Sit with that. This is not a group that lacks capability. It’s a group that the standard machinery of hiring and managing reliably screens out and the Buckland Review was clear that the barrier is the process, not the person. 

And the screening starts long before the interview room. Autism and ADHD have historically been diagnosed using criteria built around how they present in boys, which means women are routinely missed, diagnosed far later in life, or misread as simply “difficult” or “scattered.” So, the woman in my hiring story isn’t unusual; many of the most capable neurodivergent candidates a firm will ever see don’t arrive with a tidy diagnosis and a list of adjustments. They arrive having spent years being quietly told they don’t quite fit, which is exactly the signal a sloppy hiring process is primed to confirm. 

Why Does Professional Services Screen Out Neurodivergent Talent?

The exclusion isn’t usually malicious. It’s structural, and it’s built into things firms think of as neutral. 

Start with recruitment. The competency interview: improvise a polished narrative, hold eye contact, read the room, handle a curveball question on the spot. This is close to a worst-case scenario for many neurodivergent candidates. It doesn’t test whether someone can do the job; it tests whether they can perform a particular social script under pressure. The Buckland Review specifically flagged ambiguous interviews as a barrier and recommended practical job trials instead because what you actually want to know is whether someone can do the work, and there’s a more direct way to find out. 

Then there’s the environment. The open-plan floor, the fluorescent light, the ambient noise, the expectation of constant availability and unstructured interruption these are repeatedly cited in the research as among the most significant barriers for autistic workers. They’re also, notably, modifiable at low cost, yet they’re usually treated as an individual’s special request rather than a basic question of how the office is designed. 

And then there’s the billable-hour culture itself. A model that prizes visible, fast, socially fluent client interaction over deep, quiet, heads-down work quietly undervalues exactly the kind of contribution many neurodivergent professionals are best at. The work gets done but the person doing it doesn’t fit the picture of what “high performer” is supposed to look like, so the recognition lands elsewhere. 

What Is the Real Business Case for Hiring Neurodivergent Talent?

There’s a popular version of this argument that goes: hire neurodivergent people because they’re secretly superhuman at data and you’ll outperform everyone. You’ll see claims of dramatic productivity gains thrown around. I’d be careful with those; a lot of the eye-catching percentages trace back to single programmes or get repeated without a solid source, and overselling the “savant” angle does its own kind of harm. It turns people into a collection of useful traits and quietly writes off anyone who doesn’t come with a marketable superpower. 

The honest case is simpler and stronger. Firms compete for analytical talent. There’s a large, capable, badly underemployed pool of exactly that talent. The only reason you’re not accessing it is that your processes are filtering for the wrong things. Fix the filter and you reach people your competitors are still screening out. You don’t need anyone to be a savant for that maths to work. 

What Do Inclusive Leaders Do Differently?

The leaders getting this right treat it as a question of structure rather than sentiment. 

They change how they assess. They use work-sample tasks and trials instead of relying on the improvised interview, send questions in advance, and judge candidates on output rather than on eye contact and small talk. Crucially, they apply this to everyone “inclusion by design,” as the Buckland Review calls it, where the environment and process are built to let any candidate succeed, so that adjustments stop being a stigmatised special favour. 

They design the environment deliberately. Quiet space, control over sensory load, clear written expectations alongside the verbal ones, predictable structure where it’s cheap to provide. Most of this costs little and helps far more people than the ones who formally disclose. 

And they separate contribution from performance of contribution. They notice the person whose value is real but quiet, and they make sure the reward system can see them because in the end that’s what inclusion comes down to: who gets heard, who gets sponsored, and whether your metrics can actually detect the work that matters. 

A Question to Ask About Your Own Hiring

So, here’s the question I keep coming back to: 

Think about your firm’s last graduate intake, or your last lateral hire. How much of what got someone through the door was their ability to do the work and how much was their ability to perform a particular kind of confident, fluent, eye-contact-holding social script in a high-pressure room? 

Because if your process mostly rewards the performance, you are not selecting for the best people. You are selecting for the best performers of a narrow type and quietly turning away some of the most capable people who would ever apply. 

What is one thing in how your firm hires or runs its teams that tests the performance of competence rather than the competence itself? 

About the Author

James Nathan is a Partner at Stanton Chase London. With more than twenty-five years in executive search and professional services, he advises boards and senior leadership teams across consulting, legal, accountancy, and financial advisory on high-stakes leadership appointments and succession decisions, from specialist boutiques to private equity-backed and established global businesses. He qualified as a Chartered Accountant before building his career in recruitment and advisory, and he works with clients on leadership structure, succession planning, and talent strategy through periods of growth, transformation, and leadership transition.