This email in 30 seconds: Marc Crawley, founder of Diversita, joined me for a conversation about reasonable adjustments and the disclosure decision neurodivergent candidates face when applying for jobs. We talked about what makes someone more likely to disclose, why organisations still do not have the data they need, and what three things would make a real difference. And at the end: Marc and I are announcing something we have been building together. Cohort one of the Recruitment Champion Training is open for booking now.
Hello Reader,
This week, I am back talking about one of my favourite topics – neuro-inclusive recruitment. And why it is so important to get it right.
Most neurodivergent candidates do a risk assessment before they apply for a job. They may not call it that, but that is what it is.
They Google the company. They read the job description carefully. They look at the application process. They check whether anyone at the organisation is openly talking about their neurotype on LinkedIn. They piece together a picture. And based on that picture, they decide whether or not to disclose.
I had a conversation recently with Marc Crawley, founder of Diversita, about exactly this. Marc has a background in recruitment spanning 17 years, including director-level roles at Hays, and founded Diversita in 2022. He also has a personal connection to this work: his youngest son is autistic, and what Marc was seeing in recruitment practice was what prompted him to start the business.
We were talking specifically about reasonable adjustments during recruitment. What candidates are experiencing, what organisations are doing (and not doing), and what actually helps. I wanted to share the highlights here because this conversation covered ground that I think a lot of organisations still need to hear.
The disclosure decision is not simple
One of the things Marc said early on stayed with me: most people in his community go through some level of risk analysis around disclosure. Whether to tell an organisation they are neurodivergent, and when, is not a casual decision. It involves weighing up a lot of signals.
Those signals start before someone even submits an application. The company website. The language in the job description. Whether there is an easy, visible way to request adjustments in the application itself. Whether the organisation has a neurodiversity employee resource group. Whether any of this seems genuine rather than performative.
A job description that is technically inclusive is not enough on its own. If the rest of the candidate journey does not support disclosure, the job description is just one data point among many.
That said, Marc was clear that even in his community, where people are more engaged with these conversations, disclosure decisions lead to quite varied experiences. Some organisations respond well. Others do not. And the data organisations hold on any of this is, by most accounts, poor.
The data gap is real
Marc referenced a City and Guilds report suggesting only around a third of neurodivergent candidates disclose during job applications. That is not a surprising figure. What is striking is what sits behind it: organisations often are not capturing this information in any meaningful way, which means they cannot see the gap and cannot measure progress.
This is something I encountered at EY when we were trying to capture neurodiversity data internally. Even with genuine intent and resource, it is complicated. There is no globally consistent definition of neurodiversity. There is genuine disagreement about which conditions sit within it. And when you are operating across multiple countries using a shared system, you quickly realise how much terminology varies.
Marc's suggestion, which I thought was practical and worth repeating, is to start by tracking who is asking for adjustments. Disclosure and adjustments do not have to be treated as the same thing. Someone can request an adjustment without disclosing a diagnosis. If you start counting who is asking, you start building a picture. It is not perfect data, but it is a starting point.
The deeper point here is that adjustments offered by default, without requiring disclosure, reduce the barrier considerably. When a candidate knows they can ask for what they need without having to explain their neurotype, the risk calculation shifts.
What happens when people do not disclose
Marc walked through a pattern that I recognise from my own consultancy work. A candidate navigates the recruitment process without disclosing. They get the role. They join the organisation. And then, fairly quickly, they start to see whether the culture is one that would have embraced disclosure or not.
If it is not, they mask harder. Masking takes energy. Sustained masking leads to exhaustion, and exhaustion leads to underperformance. What could have been addressed at the point of onboarding, with an early conversation about what the person needs to work well, instead becomes an underperformance issue months down the line.
Marc put it directly: a non-disclosure at application stage can cascade all the way through to a performance management conversation that could have been avoided entirely. The failure point is not the individual. It is the absence of a process that made disclosure feel safe.
Three things that would actually help
I asked Marc for three things organisations should be doing as a bare minimum. Here is what he said:
Awareness across everyone involved in recruitment. Every person who touches the recruitment process, whoever organises interviews, conducts first stages, makes decisions, should have at least a conversational understanding of neurodiversity. Not depth. Just enough to know what they are looking at and how to respond well.
More developed training for anyone in a management role. Line managers need to understand reasonable adjustments in practice: why they are asked for, what equity means in this context, and how to have the conversation without making it feel like a burden. A one-size approach does not work here. Managers need enough knowledge to have a real conversation.
A joined-up look at the recruitment process. Not just the job description. The whole journey. What does the application page look like? How easy is it to disclose or request an adjustment? What happens at interview? How is rejection communicated? How does onboarding happen if someone gets the role? Each of these is a touch point where inclusion is either present or absent. Fixing one and leaving the others unchanged does not fix the experience.
None of these are significant structural changes. They are not expensive. They require intent, and they require follow-through.
A note from me
Marc and I collaborate on training work, so I am not an impartial observer here. But this conversation reminded me why the recruitment lens matters so much.
Organisations often invest in culture, in manager capability, in employee resource groups. And then the first experience a neurodivergent person has is a recruitment process that was not designed with them in mind. The message that sends, before the person has even started, is hard to undo.
Which is why Marc and I are announcing something we have been working on together.
Introducing the CPD Accredited Recruitment Champion Training Programme
One of the things Marc and I have talked about a lot is this: you do not need everyone in your recruitment team to be an expert in neurodiversity. But you do need someone who is.
Someone who has enough depth to spot where the process is letting candidates down. Someone who can guide a colleague through a disclosure conversation they were not expecting. Someone who can look at a job description or an interview format and know what needs to change. Someone the rest of the team can go to when they are not sure what to do. That is what this training is designed to build.
The Recruitment Champion Training is a new programme from PegSquared and Diversita. It is built for people who want to go beyond awareness and develop the knowledge and confidence to create genuinely neuro-inclusive recruitment processes, and to support the colleagues around them in doing the same.
Cohort one - starts in June - and is open for booking now.
Find out more and secure your place at recruitment.pegsquared.co.uk
Have a lovely bank holiday!
Tania
Founder, PegSquared
P.S. Marc and I are also building something bigger together later this year. More on that soon.
