How Washington became A top state for autism-inclusive hiring
Bob Perry, a self-employed business owner of Bob’s Bees, works on building a beehouse in Spokane, WA, 2014. Perry is living with autism.
People living with autism in the U.S. historically fared worse when seeking employment than other, non-disabled applicants. There are around 31,000 disabled workers in 2019, but this number accounts for only 12% of the total workforce.
Infographic shows the steady increase of employed people with disabilities from 2009–2019.
For Washington residents living with autism, job prospects are a little higher. 75% of residents are finding employment, according to a study conducted at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute.
In recent years, Washington’s high rate of autism employment has largely been the result of the collaboration of new research-based hiring programs for people living with autism created in the last decade.
Before connecting with autism-inclusive hiring programs in Washington, Julie Perry, Board Member of the Autism Society of Washington and mother of a 33 year-old with autism, experienced barriers in each step of the traditional job application.
“We applied to hundreds of jobs online and got rejection after rejection,” said Perry. “It’s a lot harder for people with autism to find a job without supporting organizations. People with autism often have different work accommodations and don’t do as well with processes that don’t account for their needs.”
In recent years, Washington’s high rate of autism employment has largely been the result of new research-based hiring programs created specifically for people with autism. One prominent organization created for autism-inclusive hiring is the Autism @ Work Roundtable, created in 2017. The Autism @ Work Roundtable is comprised of corporate companies, including JP Morgan Chase & Co, SAP Software Solutions, Microsoft, and Ernst & Young.
These companies collaborated with Hala Annabi, an associate professor and researcher at the University of Washington Information School, to develop the Autism @ Work Playbook, a research document. The document outlines key organizational practices to educate hiring managers about autism, as well as effective communication strategies to recruit, support, and retain employees with autism.
The inspiration to create the Autism @ Work research project came from Annabi’s standpoint as a woman of color in tech. She was interested in the intersection of women with disabilities in tech but found a surprising lack of research in that area.
“The ‘pain point’ of companies I worked with was that the tech industry lacked an established standard for autism hiring programs, so a large amount of companies were reaching out to companies in the Employer Roundtable directly,” said Annabi.
After the Autism @ Work Playbook was established, companies who created autism hiring programs then partnering with autism-supporting organizations. One of these organizations is PROVAIL, one of Washington’s largest multi-service organizations for people with disabilities.
PROVAIL believes the special application channel helps prevent people with autism from getting lost in the larger pool of applicants. Their organization partners with Microsoft to work on autism hiring. Autistic applicants email their cover letter and resume directly to an autism hiring channel.
Danielle Biddick, an Inclusive Hiring Manager at PROVAIL helps facilitate the interview process, which adds an evaluation of soft skills — communication skills, social intelligence, and career-oriented attributes. Autism is a spectrum disorder, ranging from mild in which individuals might struggle with changing a routine, to severe, in which individuals can be nonverbal, so PROVAIL helps identify if a candidate would be a good fit for Microsoft’s environment.
“Interviewing can be the first barrier to hiring, since the folks we’ve worked with struggle with speaking about themselves,” said Biddick, “During interviewing, PROVAIL hiring managers evaluate their soft skills and if those skills can be coachable. From there, managers evaluate them on their technical skills alone.”
Individuals with autism who work with PROVAIL commonly struggle with social communication, such as reading social cues and talking about appropriate times, as well as sensory issues — sensitivity to light, sound, or information overloads, according to the National Autistic Society. PROVAIL helps by making reasonable accommodations for employees with autism, such as private offices, and assists with social situations. The training is also for managers and employees as well, so that they can understand how to support a new employee with autism. .
“We help with training communication through role play exercises, provide email templates and cross-check emails, and teach workplace etiquette with managers,” said Biddick, “We get creative. If someone with autism doesn’t like a certain task, like being on call, that employee can ‘trade’ the task for another small project that needs to get done.”
Kyle Schwaneke, an XBox Software Engineer holds up an origami resembling the Microsoft Cortana logo in the company’s headquarters in Redmond, WA, 2016. Schwaneke was among Microsoft’s first pool of job candidates who interviewed through the autism hiring program partnered with PROVAIL (Microsoft)
According to Biddick, PROVAIL and Microsoft’s partnership is effective for long-term job retention. Most of the companies in the Autism @ Work Roundtable are in the tech and business fields; however, not all individuals with autism find these programs to be the best fit for them due to different interests or where they fall on the spectrum.
Other individuals with autism, like Perry’s son Bob found a better fit for his interests with trade-skill employment programs for people with disabilities.
“I got him in group-supported employment for people with autism,” said Perry, “The federal government has a program where they have to employ a certain amount of special needs workers to help with maintenance, like landscaping,” said Perry.
One of these autism-inclusive landscaping companies is Go2 Property Services, a landscaping company in Washington owned by Goodwill of Seattle headquarters.
“We try to employ people that the Federal Government is either subsidizing or has a disablement,” said Mark Ramirez, Goodwill’s former Director of Business Services, “The goal is always to help a person with barriers to employment in the commercial world to gain some experience.”
Perry’s group-supported employment lasted until the economic changes in 2008, and he had to find another autism hiring program. His job coach suggested self-employment, so he started Bob’s Bee Houses, a company that sells bee houses, beeswax products, and garden tools online and at local fairs.
Bob and Julie Perry set up a table to sell Bob’s Bee House products on November 12, 2018 at the Spokane Folk Fest in Spokane, WA, Saturday, November 10, 2018. Bob Perry handmakes each of the products (Bob’s Bee House)
“As any small business owner knows, running a business is challenging though. Even if we work for an entire weekend at a fair, our total profits barely make minimum wage,” said Perry.
Perry believes that there should be more advocacy to increase opportunities for people with disabilities.
“Not all companies know that people with disabilities can be a valuable resource,” said Perry, “As the economy changes, hopefully new types of jobs can drive people to open their hearts and employ people with disabilities.”
As companies expand their inclusion efforts they are driven by economic factors as well as philanthropic factors, according to the Disability Inclusion Advantage, a research report conducted by conducted by Accenture, the American Association for People with Disabilities, and Disability:IN. The report states by tapping into the largely unemployed population of people with disabilities could increase the U.S. GDP by $25 billion if just 1% more of people with disabilities joined the labor force.
As Washington’s rate of employment for people living with autism increases each year with more corporations enacting inclusive initiatives, other states may follow suit.
“More companies should do more with inclusive hiring,” said Biddick, “All of the people we’ve hired have done well in their jobs, which shows that they just needed someone to take a chance on them.”