The New Talent Pool

For an increasing number of companies, hiring autistic employees is good business.

- Neil Parmer

Chargeback loves obsessive employees. The Utah-based company investigates and documents credit card disputes— every time someone claims a card was used without their permission—and so its analysts must be persistent and nitpicky, with a sharp eye for detail that not everyone has.

That’s why its president, Khalid El-Awady, recently hired a 36-year-old analyst named Carrie Tierney. She breezed through training and handles technical data, computer requirements, and repetitive tasks with ease, in about half the time new analysts usually take. “We’ve been very, very impressed,” says El-Awady. The experience has convinced him to consider more employees with Tierney’s abilities—and, by medical textbook standards, disabilities.

Tierney is on the autism spectrum. But her hiring is not unique. She represents a vanguard in the war for talent, in which American companies— mostly large, but some small, too—are increasingly recruiting what they now call neurodiverse workers. It’s still the early days, but more and more companies say these individuals have proven to be a competitive advantage due to their creative, detail-oriented, and technically adept traits. “It’s fertile ground,” says Susanne Bruyère of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Institute on Employment and Disability at Cornell University.

As companies discover the value of having autistic employees, many are making major changes to their hiring practices. Today, roughly 50 companies in the U.S. have a workforce that’s primarily made up of autistic workers, says Michael Bernick, a former director of California’s labor department who is now counsel to Sedgwick law firm and writes about neurodiversity.