All of us want our employees and teams to be engaged, committed, productive and satisfied. And evidence repeatedly shows that diverse teams are more innovative and better able to tackle complex problems more successfully.
Multiple perspectives, backgrounds and experiences improve problem-solving capability, raise team intelligence and increase creativity while reducing ‘mindless’ conformity.[1], [2]
Diversity is good for business
There’s also a strong financial case for building a more inclusive workplace. According to the Diversity Council of Australia, greater executive and board diversity in organisations leads to returns that are more than 50 per cent higher, and gross earnings that are 15 per cent higher, than organisations with lower diversity.
But historically speaking, we’ve relied heavily on subjective methods of candidate selection.
We all have unconscious biases
Recent research shows how, despite our best efforts, we’re all subject to biases. Because we have to process millions of pieces of information, our brains create mental shortcuts – the word ‘bias’ derives from the Greek word ‘oblique’ meaning a diagonal line.
These shortcuts help us to navigate the world with minimal effort. Making conscious decisions takes a lot of brainpower and biases allow us to conserve energy for more important decisions.
Extensive research has shown that preferring people based on gut instinct – or because their children go to the same school as us, or they enjoy the same hobbies as us – is as likely to result in a good hire as flipping a coin. When we make quick judgements about people, most of it happens unconsciously based our background, cultural environment and personal experiences. And if we’re not using scientific and objective selection tools, those biases will often impact our hiring decisions.
Being aware of our biases isn’t enough to help make good decisions
If we’re automatically disqualifying people based on unconscious biases, without really understanding the basis of our decisions, we’re immediately reducing the pool of talent we invite into our organisation –and this means we’re reducing the likelihood of hiring the very best people for the job.
In other words, we’re hiring someone who fits into an unconscious, possibly irrational, preconceived idea of what the best person will be like.
In this sense, assessments are blind to some of the factors that may have traditionally triggered biases, such as name, gender, ethnicity, weight and age. Assessments treat every person in the same way regardless of these factors.
There is a way to beat our biases
Scientifically developed and validated psychometric assessments measure people’s attributes and behaviours objectively, regardless of their ethnicity, gender, age, level of education and other characteristics.
This means you can be confident you’re accurately assessing specific attributes, such as problem-solving ability, work-related values, emotional intelligence, integrity and more in a bias-free and inclusive manner.
And, just as importantly, candidates see you’ve opted to use fair, bias-free recruitment tools that give everyone an equal opportunity.
Psychometric assessments remove this kind of bias from the selection process by treating every candidate fairly and assessing them against the same set of criteria
Your candidates want to feel they’ve had a fair chance to display their knowledge, skills and experience during the recruitment process.
And as an employer, you need to demonstrate your selection process treats every candidate equally and doesn’t discriminate against people based on irrelevant factors like age, gender or ethnicity. You also need to ensure the selection tools you use are relevant to the role you’re recruiting for.
Your candidates should be able to see a clear link between the content of the assessment and the job they’re applying for (also known as face validity).
Plus, they should know the assessment is doing what it’s supposed to do – measuring attributes that are required to be successful on the job (also known as predictive validity).
This will enhance the experience candidates have when applying for a job with your organisation, which has numerous repercussions – particularly if you’re a consumer-facing business. It also means you’re not wasting time and money using ineffective selection methods.
Psychometric assessments like Revelian discriminate against neurodivergent candidates. Please don’t force those candidates through these ableist tests, especially if they’ve been brave enough to disclose their diagnosis and trusted you enough to ask for a fair alternative. With the exception of a hiring team working for the Victorian government, recruiters are generally willing to do the right thing once I’ve pointed out this problem. Proactively offering such adjustments to all neurodivergent applicants would be a wonderful way for disability-confident employers to demonstrate their genuine and sincere commitment to neurodiversity inclusion.
I haven’t been able to find any scientific research investigating whether psychometric screening like Revelian discriminates against neurodivergent people, but surveys, reports and court cases show that this is a very real problem. The Center for Democracy & Technology’s report ‘Algorithm-driven Hiring Tools: Innovative Recruitment or Expedited Disability Discrimination?’ explores how businesses like Revelian market themselves as the solution to ‘unconscious bias’, while perpetuating ableism through unaccountable assessments that focus on irrelevant factors like eye-contact or being able to match an emotion to a facial expression. (Revelian has one of those called Emotify, from the Youtube video it looks like a homebrand version of Simon Baron-Cohen’s Reading the Mind in the Eyes test.) Another great source is the AchieveAbility report ‘Neurodiverse voices: Opening Doors to Employment’, which concludes that ‘Psychometric tests disable neurodivergent applicants’. Then there’s two court cases from the UK, the Government Legal Service v Ms T Brookes in 2017 and Meier v BT in 2019, which both concluded that situational judgement questions discriminate against autistic people. I’m unaware of any similar court cases in Australia, but one is certainly possible unless psychometric firms take responsibility for how their questionnaires exclude neurodivergent candidates.
Candidates are more likely to have a fair chance to display their knowledge, skills and experience during the recruitment process if they are assessed through a task approximating something that would actually happen in the workplace. I enjoy writing so I always asked to do the written exercise from last year’s assessment centre instead of a psychometric test, but recruiters should give all neurodivergent applicants the opportunity to demonstrate their strengths in the way that is accessible to them and that is relevant to the inherent requirements of the job. I don’t see much ‘face validity’ in popping colourful word balloons, rapidly pounding the space bar on my keyboard or guessing the next panel of an abstract comic strip about geometrical shapes.
If you are remotely serious about providing neurodivergent candidates with a fair recruitment process, don’t use Revelian assessment. Use a relevant assessment.
People Solution’s excellent white paper ‘Improving the recruitment and selection of people with disabilities’ has a whole paragraph on putting disabled jobseekers through psychometrics, which I’ll paste here.
Honestly, that all sounds rather complicated to me and given that psychometricians don’t seem to really know how these tests impact neurodivergent applicants, I don’t think it’s worth risking the discrimination. People Solutions may well agree. Their white paper’s great section on neurodiversity recommends that employers “Look for alternatives to traditional recruitment methods (e.g. work trial, portfolio, or presentation instead of resumes, psychometric testing, and interviews).”
While I’m grateful that the public sector recruiters I’ve interacted with, besides those managing the Victorian government’s ‘disability pathway’, have been professional enough to replace psychometric barriers like Revelian with written exercises that genuinely relate to the inherent requirements of the role, I’m not happy that it took me two years to realise that this could be an option. Once I did it felt like I was ordering from McDonald’s Secret Menu or that I’d found a cheat code to inspire graduate recruiters to take my applications seriously. Neurodivergent applicants deserve much better, which is why the responsible thing for businesses like Revelian to do is to start encouraging employers to proactively offer them job-relevant substitutions for psychometrics.