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

An interesting pair of articles came my way this weekend. The first, was in Canada’s Vancouver Sun regarding the exiting of women from law firms.“Of 1,400 Canadian lawyers surveyed, 84 per cent of women and 66 per cent of men rated “an environment supportive of my family and personal commitments” as an important factor in choosing to work at another firm. Money and career advancement were well down the list. And nearly a third of the women and half the men said they expected to leave their current employer within five years.

Work-life balance may have become something of a cliche but the evidence is incontrovertible: Professionals — yes, even lawyers — want a life as well as a career.”

Back to corporate culture, where much of the management talk doesn’t match individual managers’ walk. If you’re struggling with the similar turnover, then the key words you should focus on aren’t what people want, but what it costs per hire to ignore it.

“Focus isn’t the problem. Every organization, public and private, should keep an eye on the bottom line. The question is whether a model that incurs a dropout rate of experienced, talented women that’s twice the rate of men makes any business sense. One estimate put the cost of an associate’s departure — taking into account recruitment, training and severance — at $315,000.”

Yours may not be that high, but considering the same items, you can rough your cost by figuring one to three times the annual salary of the position, whether it’s a receptionist or CEO.

And please don’t be tempted to snicker thinking it’s a Canadian problem, it’s a global problem, and it’s going to get worse.

The second article, in Boston.com, talks about the lengths some companies are going to to recruit moms—those women who took time out to have kids and the potential for flexibility that should be built into future careers.

“In just the past few years, spurred largely by a tight market for white-collar labor, firms such as the investment banks Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs have launched targeted recruiting programs. A new class of headhunters and human resources consultants has emerged to help smaller companies do the same. Other companies, including the accounting firm Ernst and Young and management consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton…. Elite business schools like Dartmouth’s Tuck School and the Harvard Business School have programs similar to Wharton’s, and the how-tos of finding and hiring women coming off a career break – women who are “onramping,” in the current human-resources parlance – are hot topics in business school classrooms.”

“And it shouldn’t just be women of child-bearing age who take advantage of them, according to many of the executives and academics working on these programs. The broader goal, they say, is for careers with periodic off- and onramps to become a mainstream option for men and women.”

“We’re starting to look at flexibility over the course of a career rather than just in the course of a year or week,” says Carolyn Buck Luce, a global managing partner at Ernst and Young and chair of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force. “It’s just the beginning.”

It may be just beginning, but the shortage of people at all levels and in all fields, not just professionals, is now, so for the smartest CEOs, the future culture is now, too.