The candidates who kept failing interviews, but not the job
In 2015, JPMorgan ran a small, quiet experiment. The bank was facing an IT talent shortage in its Delaware technology centre, so it hired four autistic employees as software testers. It was a pilot, nothing more.
What made these four people notable wasn't a lack of ability. It was that they had been failing job interviews for years. Not because they couldn't do the work, but because the interview measured something else entirely: eye contact, small talk, and the confidence to sell yourself in a room. The skills the job actually required never got a look-in.
Then the results came back.
What the pilot revealed
Six months in, JPMorgan reports that those four employees were 48% faster than colleagues who had been doing the same job for three to ten years. The program held a 99% retention rate, a figure most hiring managers can only dream of.
(JPMorgan has also cited productivity gains as high as 90 to 140% in some roles. Those are company-reported figures and are worth treating with appropriate caution, but the 48% speed advantage and the 99% retention are the numbers that tell the real story.)
The pilot didn't stay a pilot for long. JPMorgan's Autism at Work program has since grown from software testing to more than 40 role types, data analytics, compliance, audit, across nine countries.
Microsoft reached the same conclusion, and scrapped the interview
The same year, Microsoft looked at the problem from the other end and made a bolder move: it stopped interviewing neurodivergent candidates in the traditional sense altogether.
Instead, Microsoft runs a week-long academy where candidates simply do the job, with the team, in a low-pressure environment. No performance under fluorescent lights. No proving you can improvise clever answers to abstract questions. Just the work, done in the conditions where good work actually happens.
Both companies, independently, arrived at the same insight.
The interview was the wall
Here's the uncomfortable truth these programs expose: the talent was always there. The people existed, the skills existed, the productivity existed. What stood between them and the job was the interview itself.
A conventional interview quietly tests a very specific set of traits, verbal fluency under pressure, comfort with eye contact, the social choreography of small talk, the willingness to self-promote. For a huge number of capable people, those traits have nothing to do with whether they can do the job well. The interview wasn't a filter for ability. It was a wall.
Inclusion means moving the wall, not lowering the bar
This is the part that matters most, because it's the part people get wrong.
Inclusive recruitment is often heard as "making it easier", softening standards, letting weaker candidates through. JPMorgan and Microsoft prove the opposite. Nobody lowered the bar. The bar, can this person do the work, and do it well, stayed exactly where it was. In fact, the bar was met more emphatically than by incumbent staff.
What changed was the wall. They moved the artificial barrier that had been screening out capable people for reasons that had nothing to do with capability. Skills-first assessment, work-sample evaluation, and low-pressure environments didn't make the job easier. They made the assessment fairer, and in doing so, revealed talent that traditional hiring had been throwing away for years.
What this means for how you hire
You don't need to be a global bank to apply the lesson:
- Assess the work, not the performance of the interview. A work sample or a practical task tells you more about job capability than a polished conversation ever will.
- Design for lower pressure. The best candidate on a bad day of nerves is still your best candidate. Give people conditions where their actual ability can show.
- Interrogate your criteria. Every requirement that filters on communication style, confidence, or "culture fit" is a potential wall. Ask whether it genuinely predicts performance, or just predicts who interviews well.
- Separate the bar from the barrier. Keep your standards high. Remove the obstacles that have nothing to do with those standards.
The talent shortage that started JPMorgan's pilot is one that Australian employers know intimately. The lesson from Delaware and Redmond is that some of the answer isn't out there waiting to be found, it's already in your rejected-applicant pile, screened out by a process that measured the wrong thing.
Inclusion in recruitment means moving the wall, not lowering the bar. The companies that understand the difference are the ones quietly hiring the people everyone else missed.