Program Management

Organizational Neurodiversity Management

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Program Management to Neurodiversify

You may be considering your first organizational initiative to neurodiversify your workplace with talent on the autism spectrum. Employers can take three different approaches for their first initiatve, which are to:

Hire a cohort of individuals on the spectrum into various roles
Hire an individual on the spectrum into a vacant role
Hire an agency that specializes in neurodiverse talent, and will charge a placement fee or contract rates. The fees may be partially or completely government-funded.

For your first initiative, we recommend option 2 or 3 as it is less expensive and is more natural in how employers hire talent. We are certainly open to option 1 but we find employers are usually relieved to hear that cohort hiring is unnecessary.

Regardless of the option you choose, we will manage and deliver the entire process on your behalf in such a manner that you will learn from our expertise. We want you to be confident in your decisions and knowledge at every step of the initiative.

Team Participant Selection

The first step is to select a team that wants to neurodiversify. It is helpful when the team lead and members are keen on the initiative and want it to work. And, of course, it is important that the team need additional talent.

Defining Job Requirements

The second step is to decide on the job you want to fill, which will, in part, determine the level of autism talent that you will need. By level, we are referring to how much the individual is affected by autism. You can think of the levels as indicating severe, moderate, and light affect. It is at this time, that you consider any changes to the job responsibilities and outcomes to assist in determining the level of autism you are targetting in your initiative. Typically, a person on the autism spectrum who is lightly affected will not require any changes to the job responsibilities; whereas, a person who is severely affected may.

Sourcing Neurodiverse Talent

We then source the talent for you with the job posting that we reviewed and agreed upon in the previous step. At times, we may already have individuals available and employment-ready who fit the role(s) you are seeking to fill.

Employment Assessments

We have a process at Orbital in which we meet and assess job seekers on the spectrum. For details, please refer to Neurodiverse Individuals from the Home Page.

Hiring & Onboarding

From the applicants, we will short-list the individuals we have determined are the best fit for you. We will provide you the opportunity to meet them and make the final decision to hire.

For the job offer and onboarding, we will work closely with the hiring manager and HR to ensure the transition into the workplace is smooth for all parties. The team and other stakeholders can expect to receive our training on autism.

Retention Services

Once you hire an individual on the spectrum whether as a contractor or permanent employee, you want to ensure you are able to retain that talent. We provide retention services for the first three months of the neurodiverse individual’s employment to help you do exactly that as part of our Program Management fee. These services include professional soft skills support to the individual on the autism spectrum and autism-specific training and support to the supervisor, colleagues, and other stakeholders in your organization.

The retention services may be funded, in part, through our partnership with CAN and RWA. Eligibility restrictions may apply.

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We are the experts.
We share our expertise with you.
Then, you become experts, too.
And that’s how we normalize neurodiversity in the workplace.