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- Autistic adults are significantly less likely to be hired despite having equal qualifications.
- Interview bias favors neurotypical social behaviors over actual job competence.
- Education and diagnostic disclosure together reduce bias in hiring decisions.
- Masking autistic traits during job interviews leads to mental health strain and burnout.
- Structured interviews, skill-based tasks, and disability education improve autism employment outcomes.
Even with good resumes and skills right for the job, autistic adults often run into problems getting hired. These problems aren’t about being able to do the work. They are because hiring systems care more about how people act socially than if they can do the job. Typical job interviews act like a filter. They block good candidates just because they show up differently. We need to understand how these systems work. Then we can change them. This is key to getting fair jobs for autistic people.
First Impressions Can Be Misleading
Our brains make fast judgments. Studies show people decide if they can trust someone, if they are good at things, and if they like them very quickly after seeing their face or hearing them speak (Willis & Todorov, 2006). These quick decisions aren’t based on thinking. They come from gut feelings and social signals we’ve learned, like how someone looks, sounds, moves, or makes eye contact.
Hiring managers often use these impressions to make big decisions. But many signals we depend on change depending on culture or situation. They don’t always show how well someone can do a job. For example, someone who doesn’t make eye contact might seem like they are hiding something or aren’t honest. But this behavior is just how some neurodiverse people communicate.
Autistic people often express themselves differently than what’s expected. This includes things like how they use their voice, show feelings on their face, or use personal space (Todorov et al., 2012). People often mistake these differences as not being good socially or not caring. This wrongly shapes first impressions. And that leads to biased hiring decisions.
When Social Differences Are Misjudged
Autism shows up as different brain wiring. This is especially true for how people communicate and how they handle what they sense. While these differences aren’t bad on their own, society often misunderstands them and calls them problems. For example
- Not making much eye contact may be seen as not being honest or not caring.
- Talking in a flat voice might be misread as not caring.
- Focusing hard on technical details may seem off-topic to interviewers.
Several studies have shown how neurotypical people see autistic behaviors. Sasson and others (2017) found that people often saw autistic candidates as socially awkward or hard to approach. This happened even when the autistic people acted right for the situation (Sasson et al., 2017).
Simply put, it’s not always what autistic people do. It’s how other people see and misunderstand it. These ideas about people really matter in job interviews and places where people work together.
Albright and others (2017) also found something important: many neurotypical coworkers said they’d rather not work with autistic people. This discomfort wasn’t because autistic people did anything wrong. It came from small differences in how they talked compared to what people expected.
The Interview Trap: Qualified but Overlooked
The job interview is a big problem in getting a job. They seem designed to check if someone can do the job. But interviews usually check things like how people act with others, how confident they seem, and if they are charming. These ideas are unclear and can be very biased.
One important study looked at job interviews for autistic people. Researchers did fake interviews with candidates who were just as qualified. Some were autistic, some were neurotypical (Sasson et al., 2022). The result was surprising: autistic candidates were rated much lower on things like how excited they seemed, how well they talked to people, how much people liked them, and how professional they were. This was true even though they had the same skills and gave similar good answers.
These personal impressions directly changed if people thought the candidate could be hired. Autistic people were often not hired. Not because they couldn’t do the job, but because they didn’t seem right socially. Interviews are supposed to find the best person for the job. This bias shows a basic failure to do that.
Judging the Delivery, Not the Content
Here’s something important from the same study: when hiring people were given only the written answers from candidates (no sound or video), autistic candidates were rated just as well. Sometimes they were rated even better than the neurotypical candidates.
This shows their answers themselves were good. The problem was how they said them.
What this means is clear and troubling: interviewers care more about style than what is actually said. How someone looks, sounds, and other performance-like signals can make people seem better or worse at the job than they are. This puts people with different communication styles at a disadvantage, especially autistic candidates.
Using delivery as a measure in interviews punishes being real and being neurodiverse. It builds exclusion into a process that should be fair and focused on skills.
Why Traditional Interviews Are Unequal
Most interviews rely a lot on biases about personality, how people talk, and what culture expects. Things often liked during hiring, like fitting in with the team, being good with people, or having a good handshake, can cause problems. These expectations are just random obstacles for people who experience and deal with the world differently, like autistic people.
Even jobs that are mostly about tasks and don’t need strong social skills (like coding, lab work, data analysis, or quality checking) often use typical interviews or group tests. These tests have social parts that don’t matter for the job. When how the job is assessed doesn’t match what the job needs, it hurts diversity. And it means companies don’t get truly skilled people.
Basically, today’s hiring ways care more about looking good socially than about what people can actually do. This process regularly filters out many autistic people applying for jobs. This is especially true during in-person interviews, group tasks, and tests about how people act.
The Limits of Training and Coaching
People might think the answer is to teach autistic people how to be better at interviews. Interview coaching and practice can help some people feel more sure of themselves. But they often teach masking. Masking is when someone hides autistic traits by copying how neurotypical people act, like making eye contact, doing small talk, or changing their voice tone.
But many studies warn that masking might help for a short time, but it costs a lot in the long run. Bradley and others (2021) found that the more autistic adults masked, the more they had anxiety, depression, and felt burned out (Bradley et al., 2021). It takes a huge amount of energy to act neurotypical in interviews and at work. People often can’t keep doing it.
The Masking Dilemma
Masking is when someone purposely or not purposely hides autistic traits to seem more neurotypical. This can mean
- Forcing eye contact even when it feels uncomfortable
- Copying common social polite actions without knowing why people do them
- Stopping repeating movements or stimming
- Practicing how their face looks or how they sound
Masking might help people fit in for a short time. But Hull and others (2020) showed it’s also linked to being very tired, feeling bad about yourself, and even getting diagnosed later, especially for women (Hull et al., 2020). The mental effect of long-term masking is serious. It’s like constantly hiding how you really are socially. This harms being real and feeling good about yourself.
When hiring systems encourage masking, they make autistic people change themselves. Instead, they should change the workplace to welcome more different people.
Changing the Definition of “Fit”
The idea of “cultural fit” is one of the most unclear and difficult things used in hiring. Often, it just means: “Do I feel good being near this person?” When judged by neurotypical standards, this way of thinking punishes anyone who acts in a different way.
Real inclusion means changing what we mean by fit. We should think about
- Skills that matter for the job and how well someone can do the work
- How someone solves problems and if they are creative
- Being willing to learn new things and get better skills
- Being honest and sticking to commitments
To do this, companies need to use structured interviews. These should focus on clear skills and job results. Things like knowing the technology, being able to write well, understanding tasks, and knowing the subject area. They should not focus on being charming in talks or good at small talk.
How Education and Disclosure Shift Outcomes
There’s good news. One study checked if teaching people about autism and having candidates share their diagnosis could make people see autistic job candidates better.
Important things found by Sasson and others (2023)
- Just teaching people about autism helped hiring staff understand it better but didn’t get rid of negative ideas about autistic people.
- When a candidate just said they were autistic, without saying more, it didn’t make them get better ratings. Sometimes, it even made ratings worse.
- But when people got training about autism AND the candidate was open about their diagnosis, things got much fairer when judging candidates (Sasson et al., 2023).
This shows us that bias can change. We can deal with it, but only if we try hard and smart.
Long-Term Benefits of Employer Training
The same study checked in with people months after the training. Hiring staff who learned about autism and heard candidates talk about their diagnosis kept having fairer views of autistic candidates for a long time after the training. This means even small steps, like a 10-minute video teaching about autism, can start long-term change in how companies hire.
Think about how much difference it would make if all HR departments in big companies did this training. This would change job results for autistic people a lot, everywhere in the system.
Building More Inclusive Hiring Practices
Changing how companies hire can make a big difference in including more people and having less bias. Companies wanting to help autistic people get hired can
- Send interview questions before the interview: This helps candidates get ready and feel less stressed about performing.
- Offer different ways to interview: Think about writing answers, doing video interviews that aren’t live, or trying out the job for a bit.
- Make clear scoring guides: Having clear ways to score interview answers helps people avoid just using their feelings.
- Use job tries or paid tests: Have candidates do real job tasks instead of just talking casually or answering unclear “what if” questions.
- Train interviewers often: Doing training on diversity and inclusion that includes neurodiversity helps make hiring fairer over time.
Each of these steps helps hiring decisions be about what someone can do, not if they fit a certain mold.
Going Beyond the Offer Letter
Hiring someone is just the start of including them. Autistic workers do well when companies create workplaces where different ways of talking and sensory needs are understood and respected.
Important steps include
- Clear daily plans and what people expect: Not being sure makes people stressed. Things staying the same is important.
- Quiet or sensory-friendly places to work: Bright lights, loud noises, and messy places make people less productive and feel worse.
- Flexible work options: Working from home and changing hours helps people work in ways that fit them best.
- Talk directly and clearly: Don’t have hidden meanings or rules no one wrote down. Say exactly what you mean when giving feedback or jobs.
A workplace that respects different brain wiring means people stay longer, like their jobs more, and do better work.
Fair Hiring Helps Everyone
Hiring inclusively is not just being nice or checking a box for diversity. It’s important for business. It brings in more skilled people and helps create new ideas. Hiring autistic people leads to staff with lots of different views. These workers might be really good at noticing small things, focusing deeply, or finding new ways to fix problems.
Fair hiring practices that help autistic people also help others. This includes candidates who get anxious, people who are shy, people who don’t speak English as their first language, or anyone who doesn’t do well in interviews where you have to put on a show. Setting up interviews to be fair helps everyone.
Better ways to hire lead to hiring better people. Everyone wins.
Citations
- Sasson, N. J., Morrison, K. E., Pinkham, A. E., Faso, D. J., & Grossman, R. B. (2017). Adults with autism are less accurate at judging social situations and less inclined to approach socially close others. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(6), 1838–1844. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2194-7
- Sasson, N. J., Faso, D. J., Nugent, J., Lovell, S., Kennedy, D. P., & Grossman, R. B. (2022). Neurotypical perceptions of social awkwardness in adults with autism are driven by behavioral presentation, not reducible to specific social cues. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 52, 5985–5999. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05432-2
- Sasson, N. J., Williams, M. C., Faso, D. J., & Grossman, R. B. (2023). Education plus disclosure: A dual pathway to improved decision-making about autistic candidates in job interviews. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-025-06751-w
