Ducks in a Row: SAP’s Smart Hiring
by Miki Saxon
Some companies look spend millions in recruiter fees and poaching candidates from their competitors; others are more creative.
Those in the second category are open to staffing solutions far outside the box — even the standard race/creed/color/gender/national origin diversity box.
It’s called neurodiversity — those with some kind of cognitive disabilities, such as people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
What do you do when you have highly repetitious work that also requires a high degree of intelligence — like software testing?
That is actually a viable description of people with ASD.
Of course, that means hiring people who, for most people, aren’t the most comfortable to be around.
Roughly 60 percent of people with ASD have average or above average intelligence, yet 85 percent are unemployed.
For smart companies, such as SAP, that group is a goldmine of talent and five years ago it set a goal to have 1% of their workforce comprised of individuals with ASD.
Hiring people with ASD isn’t about charity or financial exploitation; it’s about gaining a competitive advantage and partnering with Specialisterne goes a long way to providing the right program.
So far (as of 2013) about 100 people have been hired [by SAP] for jobs including software developer or tester, business analyst, and graphic designer, and pay is commensurate to what others in those jobs earn.
SAP use an analogy that individuals are like puzzle pieces with irregular shapes.
“One of the things that we’ve done historically in human resource management is, we’ve asked people to trim away the parts of themselves that are irregularly shaped, and then we ask them to plug themselves into standard roles,” says Robert Austin, Professor of Information Systems, Ivey Business School. “SAP is asking itself whether that might be the wrong way to do things in an innovation economy. Instead, maybe managers have to do the hard work of putting the puzzle pieces together and inviting people to bring their entire selves to work.”
That approach can benefit other forms of diversity like race, gender, and sexual orientation.
“Innovation is about finding ideas that are outside the normal parameters, and you don’t do that by slicing away everything that’s outside the normal parameters. Maybe it’s the parts of people we ask them to leave at home that are the most likely to produce the big innovations.”
Read the article and then decide what’s best for your organization.
Good bosses won’t have a problem with the approach; the rest will whine and resist.
Flickr image credit: Jim Champion
