Maximizing Talent ROI: A 5-Step Guide to Company-wide Neuroinclusion

📩 Access the 5 Step Guide to Neuroinclusion

As HR professionals, we’ve seen the signs.

The pulse of the corporate world is changing, the old ways aren’t working as they did; it’s calling us to approach talent acquisition and management in innovative ways, and look for talent in places we never looked before. 

The last decade has seen neurodiversity hiring programs make a big splash in the press as a new form of DEI. However, tangible progress in this area has unfortunately been limited as detailed in this Forbes article by Michael Bernick.

In 2023 we saw a whole different story.

There was a surge in conversations that HR leaders were having across organizations; the lightbulb seems to have come on. 💡

The realization that at least 1 in every 7 humans is neurodivergent has led talent leaders to understand that an estimated 15-20% of their current workforce falls into this demographic, underscoring the need for targeted strategies and inclusion efforts.

Once leadership recognized the enormity of this talent pool, companies scrambled to acquire the latest resources and guides. They often reached out to program leaders to learn from the successes of other models and develop their own unique playbooks.

Introducing a Step-by-Step Framework to Neuroinclusive Hiring

What makes today’s conversation around neuroinclusion different from a decade before? Yes, technology has progressed, the neurodiversity umbrella is much broader; but most noticeably, we have so much more data to inform how to make neuroinclusion work, and where it might fall short.

Mentra - having built a hiring platform for neurodivegent talent - has direct access to this data. The platform's user centric approach represents the learnings from the 43,000 neurodivergent professionals served today.

Mentra’s 5-Step Guide to Neuroinclusion walks leaders along a proven, actionable model to implement company-wide neuroinclusion, based on years of research in collaboration with industry partners across the Vanderbilt Frist Center, Microsoft and enterprises across the Fortune 500 → You can access the 5-Step Guide to Neuroinclusion here.

The question on everyone’s minds 

We hear this question often from hiring leaders who are thinking of expanding their perception of talent to include neurodiversity.

Do we start neuroinclusion with hiring new talent or supporting existing employees?

The answer is both. The 5-step guide walks you through how you can do both concurrently. Once you get executive buy-in, developing a hiring program (Steps 1-3 from) is essential to provide tangible ROI and gain support necessary to sustain long-term success. Hiring involves finding champions within your organizations (especially hiring managers and recruiters) that model the successful process of building neurodiverse teams.

However, to ensure that new hires find success, it is important to build a supportive environment from the beginning. Then, building a psychologically safe environment (steps 4 - 5) across teams allows for maximum employee productivity, allowing efforts to become scalable and replicable across the organization. When these steps are replicated across teams, we see neuroinclusion scaling from Programs → Lighthouse programs → Department-wide → Company-wide Neuroinclusion (as seen in the diagram below).

Starting with Simple Steps

Application is the key to unlocking the power of knowledge; each step in the 5-step guide to neuroinclusion is accompanied by actionable to-do item. To all fellow HR professionals, download this guide and stick this to-do list on the wall of your (home or work) office! This set of tasks ensures that champions have clear, practical guidance for who to involve and how to drive success within their organizations, scaling upwards to help drive real business outcomes, ultimately creating an industry-wide impact. 

Access the actionable steps here

Let's capitalize on the newfound momentum in 2024, incorporating the best practices and learnings from past pitfalls to achieve real, tangible progress. 

And, instead of working in silos, let's join forces to build the Future of Work, together. 🌟