Name: Neurodiversity in Focus: Research-Driven Innovation at Hirevue
Uploaded: 2025-08-27T17:31:46.924Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 28 s
Description: Neurodiversity in Focus: Research-Driven Innovation at Hirevue

Transcript for "Neurodiversity in Focus: Research-Driven Innovation at Hirevue": Perfect. Awesome. Will we be seeing them? Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is the first in our new science series of webinars where we're introducing you to the Hirevue science team. They're gonna be talking about their latest research and innovation, opportunities and challenges in the world of work, and how those things are converging with the Hirevue product. I'm your host, Chelsea Kilpach, director of communications here at Hirevue, and I am so excited to talk to you today about neurodiversity. The official title of our webinar is neurodiversity and focused, research driven innovation at Hirevue. Before we jump into our introductions, I want to just put up an agenda and do a tiny bit of housekeeping. So we are gonna start today with terms to know. I find that a good level set always puts us on the right, foot so that everybody's not concentrating on what did they mean when they said that, and you can be fully engaged in the conversation. We're gonna talk about the state of neuro inclusion, introduce you to the Hirevue research team and what they've been working on and maybe will work on in the future, then talk about product design for neuro inclusion and future considerations. As we're going through this, please feel free to drop your questions in the q and a. We will get to them as we go if it makes sense. If not, we'll hold them to the end. But like my high school math teacher used to say, if you have the questions, somebody else probably does too. So please don't hesitate to put that in. Okay. Now we're gonna do introductions. I mentioned my name is Chelsea Kilpach, director of communications, but I am just here to guide through the conversation who you really wanna hear from. It's Justine and Colin, two of my amazing colleagues who I'm gonna let introduce themselves, but I wanna say that they are incredible advocates and stewards for this work. They are both very passionate, constantly learning, always providing new information to me and the rest of the team, and I'm really excited that you all get to hear from them today. So, Justine, I'm gonna have you start introduce yourself. What do you do here at HireVue and anything else you feel is relevant? Great. Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm I'm really excited to be a part of the conversation today. As Chelsea mentioned, my name is Justine Shenifou, and I work as a senior IO psychology consultant in the science delivery team, where we focus on the initial implementation of our assessments and are also the main IO link with our customers and prospects. We also focus on continuously evolving our science by bringing the learnings that we have from our customer implementations and research into the assessment product and implementation strategy. Throughout my career, both here in Canada where I currently live and internationally, I've been especially interested in how diversity in all its forms, culture, and technology come together to shape, inclusive workplaces, but also across the talent life cycle more broadly. And, at HireVue, in addition to the assessment implementation work, I've also had the chance to lead and collaborate on research to better understand how to create fair and accurate assessments for all candidates. I've also helped in the development of resources to equip and empower, our HireVue employees to start, continue, and drive the conversation around neurodiversity. And lastly, I've also been part of intern internal DNI initiatives and have also, even co led a diversity podcast, because I really believe that raising awareness and sparking that conversation is just as important as designing solutions that are really, human centered and, evidence based. Thank you, Justine. See what I see what I meant. Like, what what a bio, and it wouldn't have been as good coming for me. Colin, let's see what you got. Introduce yourself. That's a hard act to follow. Hi. My name is Colin Willis. I'm also an IO psychologist. I've been with HireVue for a little over six years now. I like to say that I've kind of done everything that an IO can possibly do at HireVue. I started, on the delivery team, the team that Justine works on as a consultant, worked with our customers every day on setting up, our assessments, training them on artificial intelligence, running errors impact reports, validation studies, you name it. If an IO could do it, I did it. And then I got an opportunity to move to our r and d team, and that's really where I started, this neurodiversity research program that I'm really excited to talk to you guys about today. I've had that appears that you know, I said the honor of doing that for about five years at this point, as well as advancing HireVue, products and scientific offerings and consulting practices in that role. And today, I work as a product scientist at HireVue, so I'm deeply embedded in our product technology organization, helping make, the next generation of our products. So really excited to talk to you guys today about this. It's a really a a personal journey for me as well. This is, really closely related to how I actually got interested into, I guess, psychology in the first place, watching my dad actually work through a lot of different, challenges in the workplace. And, actually, as of this year, he's, diagnosed autistic. Several members of my family also are neurodivergent, and so it's really just a a cool thing that I get to be able to do this at HireVue and make the the world of work just a a better place for everybody. I love that. Thank you both so much. And, I mentioned core terms. I want us to just double click on these for a second here because we've already used a few neurodiversity, neurodivergent. I think I, in the beginning, kind of mixed those terms up a little bit. Neurodiversity referring to populations, neurodivergent or neuroatypical referring to individuals. Justine, what do you wanna point out here on these core terms? Anything you want people to be aware of? Yeah. Probably a few things. First of all, around neurodivergent and, some people will confuse the term with neurodivergence. You know, it's all about making sure we're using the proper language. And so, understanding that nuance where when we talk about neurodivergent, it's really, as it mentions here, a way that your your brain works which is potentially a little bit different from the dominant societal, standards of normal. Whereas neurodivergence is really the state or condition of of having a brain that diverges, from the typical. And so, we could use neurodivergence by saying, you know, neurodivergence is a natural part of human, diversity, or his neurodivergence shapes the way, he approaches problem solving. So just wanted to to call that out here. Fantastic. And, Colin, what about this workplace context? Yeah. You'll see a lot of different terms, used in in this space, and some of the different ones I wanna call are, masking. So if that's unfamiliar to you, that's really just the idea that, neurodivergent individuals, especially, above and beyond what's typical, are mask may mask in the workplace, meaning that they're presenting, a certain, kind of, you know, face to the world, and they want to appear normal and and maybe doing that unconsciously, but it's leading to things like burnout and exhaustion that ultimately can disrupt, you know, workplace productivity and their own, job satisfaction, life satisfaction. And it's something that is, really stems from the the lack of inclusion in the workplace, the lack of design for inclusivity and accessibility that we see day to day, and we'll see some of that come up in in the research that we talk about a little bit later. Some of the other terms I wanna call out to are, person first versus identity first. So that's related to some of the core terms for neurodiversity. This is really important. You may be familiar or more comfortable saying a person with autism, but actually the preferred nomenclature is an autistic person. You'll hear we talk about autistic job seekers, autistic employees, the preference is to lead with that identity first language. So that's, really that condition is is really inclusive with the person and who they are. So you'll see that as well. And then, you'll hear us talk about things like accommodations and strengths based approaches. With accommodations, that's really just talking about what do we need to do, when accessibility fails. Right? Because our ultimate goal is to make the workplace and all of our processes more inclusive and more accessible for everybody, but sometimes that isn't possible. And so we need to have accommodations in place so that, our most qualified individuals have the, the best, opportunities that they can have to to do the work. And then lastly, for that strength based approach, that's just looking at, you know, the different qualities that, a neurodivergent individual might bring to the workplace, and that could be detailed, orientation, creativity, hyperfocus. Some of the traits, that, autistic and other neurodivergent individuals have can often be really powerful in the workplace. We wanna make sure that there's a place for that and for them. I love what you said about masking above and beyond what the average person does because when we talk about this work, I love focusing on the fact that this helps everybody. There this is about neurodiversity as a spectrum, and we all have to do some masking to a degree. It just maybe increases as you get you know, have autism. So I I love that call out. We are going to do a poll question right now. Before we jump into some statistics more broadly, we wanna know, do you identify as neurodivergent? Do you know somebody who does? So we're gonna put that up there for just a second, give folks some time to answer. And I wanna say that this strengths based approach that Colin touched on, I really think is at the heart of the movement personally in my interpretation. And you please, either of you correct me if you think think that's wrong. But this is we are looking at neurodivergence as just a a normal occurrence. It is not a deficit. It's not pathologized, and it's moving away from an ableist idea about what proper functioning looks like. So strengths based is at the heart of all of this work. And I think that's a a great call out here, Chelsea, and I'm bringing, more of the theoretical part as well is how to ensure that we differentiate between the medical versus the social model of disability. So I can speak a little bit more to that where on on the one hand, medical is is seeing that neurodivergence as a deficit, a disorder, or a problem, and the responsibility really lies on the individual to change or adapt versus the social medical the social model of disability is all about, you know, embracing that there's an natural and valid variation in human brains and that the responsibility is really on the society to adapt systems and structures. And we do just that at HireVue. We we really take that approach of taking responsibility to make the world of hiring a lot more inclusive. Awesome. Alright. Look. Let's see these results. Do you identify as neurodivergent or know someone who does? 17%. Yes. I identify as neurodivergent. 58%. Yes. I know someone who does. 25%. Both. Not a single person in here says neither. So the reason we did this poll is to show oh my gosh, this is so important. It touches all of us. I think we knew that, but it's always nice to, just, you know, have another proof point. So let's talk about state of neuroinclusion. Justine, why don't you kick us off? Sure. Yeah. So I had the great opportunity to actually attend a conference a few months back, which is called the Neurodiversity at Work Research Conference. And it's a great conference that brings together leading scholars. There's neurodivergent leaders. There's also, leading neurodiversity employers and providers that really aim to advance the understanding, the research of autistic individuals. And so, during this few days of conference, we really, were able to, understand where we are currently in terms of that newer inclusion. And so one of the first things that we discussed and that was very much acknowledged and everyone aligned on is that there is effectively a growing recognition in terms of neurodiversity's value, more particularly neurodivergent individuals, the value that they really, bring into the workplace. There's a lot of studies, a lot of research out there that effectively shows the business outcomes related to tapping into this particular target population. There was also as as we are all embedded in with the, evolution of the use of AI, artificial intelligence tools, they are effectively or they have the ability to effectively empower individuals and potentially help with, neuro inclusion. So we're we're really in a good state. However, we have to be, taking that with a bit of cautious because, progress is actually quite fragile as well at the moment. So, especially in The United States, the political climate, you know, everything related to diversity, equity, inclusion, initiatives are are really facing backlash, which ultimately can lead to, hindering the progress in terms of work and efforts for neuro inclusion. Another thing related to the political landscape is the fact that there, is a decrease in that federal funding and, enhanced scrutiny right now. I would also like to point out though, especially for Hirevue, we're we're in a quite a unique position in the sense that we do not rely on, any sort of funding, external funding, and we have a really solid, community, ecosystem with academics and nonprofits, which, enable us to to really drive this work forward despite the uncertainty, that, other, you know, academias could could, face right now. So while we're making strides, we also are, as a society and as a community, at a at a moment of vulnerability. If we, kind of take a step back even further and and look more at the macro level, when we look at the data from an employment point of view, it's quite concerning, actually. So we're seeing a significant and concerning trend of extreme unemployment among autistic adults. And when we talk about extreme unemployment, that means that they have no work at all and are even struggling to accent the job markets. In a 2022 study, there was fifty five percent autistic adults that had no or minimal vocational activities, and that translates to five hours or less of work, a week. And that's compared to nine percent in, in 02/2008. So, there's been an extreme, percentage increase in in that regard. And finally, from a global perspective, there's an estimated eighty percent of autistic, people that are unemployed. And that's even in the scenario where, these are educated college educated autistic individuals. And now adding a layer on top of this is is the the shifting demographics that we're seeing. So, right now, as we speak, there's about twenty percent of the population that are neurodivergent. And more notably is that fifty three percent of Gen Z self identify as neurodivergent. And by 2040, they're going to be making up the majority of the workforce. So as you can see, we're we're really at an inflection point right now. If companies, don't start redesigning their hiring and work practices now, they're not going to just exclude the minority, but they're really setting themselves up for a shortage skills, as they exclude the majority of tomorrow's workforce. So it also emphasizes the increasing need to focus on that your inclusion. Something else here, another challenge that was discussed is how we're currently framing neurodiversity. And so over the years, we've had good momentum, through neurodiversity work, research, the movement to broaden our awareness. But, because of that, it's also diluted the specificity. So, actually, keeping the, names explicitly stated is really, really important. Otherwise, we start being a little bit, all over the place, so to speak, when it comes to really targeting our work and our efforts. And so, all in all, we have to now kind of shift in terms of how we're we're framing your inclusion. Right? It's it's not all about diversity issue anymore. We have to see this as a economic imperative. It's about workforce optimization. It's about innovation. It's about competitiveness. It's it's more than just an awareness now. So we have to focus our attention from diversity to economic development awareness from workforce optimization to really be able to address, those labor shortages and and really tap into that, qualified talent. So all in all, it's a little bit bleak, but, it's it's still there there is a silver lining in all of this, and there also is good news because, we know what works. Right? And hard views in this space, we we we know what we can actually implement and embed to make things more neuro inclusive. And one of the things that was discussed during this, conference was, to not, forget the use of universal and adaptive design, which is a is a way to design products and environments that ensures access, usability, belonging, so that everyone can, be included in the workplace. Just as a reference here, when we talk about universal design, that makes workplaces, more inclusive by default, while adaptive design ensures that individuals still get what they uniquely need. So it's a combination of those two together that can really be the foundation of neuro inclusion. And, last but not least, one of those, silver lining bullets here is the fact that, we really need to take that interdisciplinary approach, and we do it really, really well here at Hirevue. Colin has the, the the the great, foundation here to talk about in in just a few minutes. But, being able to bring in HR tech design policy and and most importantly, centering the voices of neurodivergent individuals. Right? They need to have a say in how we're designing and developing your inclusive practices across all the life cycle, all the life, talent life cycle here. So we're at a transitional state. There's high awareness, especially, amongst the younger generations, but, the inclusion piece has not quite caught up yet in practice. So there's, there's still a significant gap between what's possible. Right? We're we're striving to have, everyone at the table, in organizations embracing, and, acknowledging people's diverse ways of thinking. However, there's still a few gaps in terms of systemic exclusion and underemployment. Justine, that was incredible. Very thorough. And every time I hear those statistics on unemployment and underemployment, it's just like the punch to the gut, and I've heard them many times. But especially, you know, just on a human level, initial punch to the gut. And then also seeing all the talk about skill shortage in this space, and it's like but there's this massive talent pool that's being overlooked. And the answer like you said, we know what works. The answer one of them is right here. We've gotta solve this problem in a lot of different ways, and this is this is the one of the ways to do that. So I also want to say I I agree that there is some positivity with positivity with this interdisciplinary approach, yet we're not getting funding taking taken away as HireVue. There's a reason we're having this conversation. It's because it is still very important to us. We do have our first question, and I think this dovetails nicely with the talk about statistics. Lauren asked, what are the panel's thoughts on self identification versus formal diagnosis for understanding neurodiversity. And and the reason I say connecting it to those facts and figures that you gave is, I mean, some of that is maybe underrepresented because you've got formal diagnosis versus self identification. So do either of you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I can I'll jump in here. So Justin mentioned a little while ago that fifty three percent statistic for Gen z, where fifty three percent of the generation identifies as neurodivergent. And, I wanna call it that that statistic includes, self diagnosed individuals, not just formally diagnosed individuals. And I think from a, you know, from a social movement perspective and Justin alluded to this too as well as that difference between the medical model and the social model. Self diagnosis, I think, is really important for the neurodiversity movement in general. Right? The the normalization, the acceptance, the destigmatization of neurodiversity and neurodivergent conditions in society is extremely important. And one of the quickest ways to get there is people becoming comfortable with their own identities and then discussing that, right, with with with each other. And one of the things that I think we run into with, the kind of the more the medical side and the the scientific side is it can be really difficult or expensive to get a diagnosis, and that can be a barrier to a lot of people who might be having challenges or notice something about themselves, but just can't access medical resources in order to get that that formal diagnosis. So from a social movement perspective, self diagnosis is really important. From a research perspective, we'll we'll take a slightly different tab. Right? We wanna know, you know, at an individual difference level, you know, someone's individual characteristics, how do those link to, job outcomes, how do those link to experiences during the talent life cycle, and how do we make really specific recommendations that are tailored to individual needs based upon the research and and more of those formal diagnosis, components. So from a research perspective, we wanna know probably both. Right? We wanna know, you know, who's who's diagnosed, whether they're diagnosed with versus someone who is self identifying one way or another. So from, you know, it's really a data question on the research side. They have really clean, well separated data so we can start asking really specific questions about data. But from a social perspective, you know, my perspective is it's a really important piece of of the puzzle. Justine, if there's anything you wanna add. Yeah. Totally aligned with, with your perspective here. I think ultimately as well is once we understand their perspective and and the way in which we can design, more inclusive practices, well, it ultimately benefits everyone. Right? So I think the the end goal here is how to how to help them, knowing that that kind of work ends up helping everyone. And so, it's it's ultimately ensuring that we we have the way to, to broaden the the inclusion spectrum here. Yeah. And you mentioned, Justine, you know, funding and and the question particularly here in The United States and, Colin, getting a diagnosis can be really expensive. Employment and health care go hand in hand here in The United States. And so if you can't get a job and you can't get on Medicaid and you definitely can't get a diagnosis. So, Lauren, appreciate that, nuance there, self identification. It's probably gonna have some growing importance in in research here. We also did have quick one from Fernanda. She wanted to know what was the name of the conference one more time, Justine, that you just went to? Yes. So it is called it was in in, Pittsburgh this year, Neurodiversity at Work Research Conference. Awesome. Neurodiversity at Work Research Conference. Alright, Colin. Justine, I already mentioned a little bit. We've got some great nonprofit partners, that we do research with. Why don't you introduce folks to the research program? Yeah. Absolutely. So I'm really excited to talk about this today. So, really, how I'm gonna approach this is twofold. I wanna kinda set up and tell the story of really how this all started, where HireVue connected to neurodiversity research in the first place, the initial questions that we're starting to ask. And then as I kinda walk through the timeline, I'll be introducing specific research and partnerships we've made along the way. So you can idea of our thought process and the research we've conducted up until this point. The goal of this slide here is, you know, I've I've kind of violated one of the the main, maxims of of PowerPoint, design or slide design. I put a lot on this slide. And that was on purpose. We've done a lot of research. We've spoken at conferences every single year since we started back in 2021. We were actually at the autism at work research workshop, which is the predecessor to the University of Work research workshop, that Justine went to this past year. We've been publishing papers, publishing commentaries. We have several, studies in progress, and we've been able we've been very productive. And that's, due in large parts of the team that's grown around this this research problem. And so I won't be going through each one of these individually, but I'll be telling the story of of how we got to this place, over the next several slides. But I wanna draw your attention to the one piece on the slide, which is our research goal and our research philosophy. So the goal here is to leverage HireVue unique combination of technology and science in our partnerships to close gaps in scientific communities' knowledge about neurodiversity and job opportunities. And I'll talk a little bit more about what that means in a minute. And what we wanna be able to do is contribute to building inclusive systems, so really that accessibility piece, right, going back to that social model, design systems that are fair and equitable for everybody, removing hiring barriers where we can. So if we see, okay, this is something that just is, you know, anachronism of the past. Let's get rid of it so it's we can make for a more accessible system. And then wherever we can't do that, we wanna develop more considerate accommodation practices. I mentioned that at the beginning. Right? Sometimes, no matter how hard we work design something that's really accessible and inclusive, we still sometimes need individually tailored accommodations so that everyone can still do and have access to the best opportunities that they can, and we wanna make sure that we are recommending best accommodations that we can in order for that to happen. So with that said, let me dive a little bit into, kind of the problem that we've been kind of wrestling with as a scientific field, and then I'll go a bit more specifically into what HireVue has been researching and who we've been partnering with. So what I did here was really just to illustrate, a typical HR dataset. And so you see here, this is meant to, you know, be a kind of a spreadsheet or a data table you might have in HR system. You have an employee ID, You have, an assessment score, and then we have some demographic values. Right? We have race, ethnicity. We have gender, age, and disability. And what I've done here is call up the different laws in The United States that govern the collection of this data. So we have the civil rights act sitting on top of race, ethnicity, and gender reporting. We have the age and employment act, sitting on top of age, and then we have the Americans with Disabilities Act sitting on top of disability. Why I wanna call all this out is that, there's actually these different laws govern these demographic questions in different ways, and it actually leads to more or less specific, data that is useful to organizations like HireVue who are producing assessments and as well as really any organization that's interested in trying to make a dent in the under unemployment problem that Justin mentioned earlier. What we know about, race and ethnicity and gender is substantially better from a research standpoint than what we know about disability and and and age as well. The reason for that is, it's actually required in US to report, race and gender data as part of hiring decisions. So there's really good data available, so that we can ask questions like, what are the passing rate differences between white and black individuals or men and women or black women, white men? We can do that really well and we can design products and technology to help address issues where there are issues. We can also do, you know, have consulting practices to help with that as well. What's harder with disability is one, it was those laws were written at a time where really the kind of the de jour thinking was, let's just try to avoid any kind of disclosure that we can in order to prevent any discrimination of of individuals who have disabilities. And so it's kind of got boiled down to a yes, no question of are you disabled or not? And if you are, do you need an accommodation, which is great for protecting medical data and it's great for, trying to shield individuals from discrimination, if that's, you know, likely to happen. What it's really difficult for is conducting research on what specific disabilities are, be impacted and then if we're starting to break that down into and reshape that into a neurodiversity type umbrella, we don't really have the data to look at that in a sophisticated way to say where is our impact, why is it happening, Who is it impacting? And can we do anything about it? And that has been really a big challenge in the research literature. So, that's really kind of the where the state of art was about six, seven years ago and what led to the research program that we have today. So going back in time, it's about, you know, six, seven years ago at this point. I'm gonna tell a story of really how we made our first partnership and asked our first research questions. An organization called Integrate Autism Employment Advisors, and if we've ever will get a link to their website at the end of the webinar. They're an amazing organization. I've, had the best time partnering with them since about 2020. Their mission is to help organizations identify, recruit, and retain, professionals on the autism spectrum. They, recruit, autistic job seekers primarily, college age coming out of college with college degrees, and then they partner with organizations to set up, specific autism network programs and place those individuals into those programs. And then they help with the training, the recruitment, as well as the manager training and kind of performance management around the whole thing. They kinda own the entire talent life cycle. About six years ago, integrate identified a customer that we had in common, and this customer was implementing HireVue at the same time that they're implementing integrate services. And it was really the first time two question a question was asked, which was, hey. We're implementing this AI technology to make hiring decisions. Is that going to cause any impact with the autistic job seekers that we're bringing into the organizations through your program? And up until this point, and this is still relatively true today, a standard practice is to recommend accommodations for anyone on the spectrum, anyone with traditional conditions that fall under the university umbrella, to either skip or have different accommodations for the assessment process, including higher views, interview based assessments, and game based assessments, which we'll talk about today. So Integrate looked at our technology at the time. They saw a couple things. And so this is going back to 2019. Hirevue was using a few different technologies in its interview assessment program. We had, tone analysis and we had what are called facial action units, which are basically a measure of facial geometry, how somebody moves their face. These were data points that we used in addition to the, actual words that people said in their interview responses, the text, you know, essentially the the actual words, the text responses of answers to questions. Integrate honed in on those two pieces, right, the facial action units and the tone analysis and said that could cause impact for any autistic individual who did not request an accommodation, who went through the process as normal, essentially as if they were a typical candidate because they might be monotone, and so they might be penalized for not having the right tone. And they might, also would have you know, they have lower facial affect, so they might be penalized for not moving their face as much as a neurotypical individual when they're responding to interview questions. So the great thing that Integrate did is they brought that straight to Hirevue. They brought it to our CEO, who took an interest in that immediately. They brought that to our CTO at the time, and we then essentially started a little research program. And the idea was to say, okay. Can we do anything about this? Do we need this technology? And Integrate's approach to us actually was one of the main factors that led to us dropping both of those technologies from our assessments back in 2020 and go with a strictly text based analysis of interview responses, removing both of those, things that could have potentially been hiring barriers I talked about before from our assessment technology. So that was really our first product change that we made based upon working with integrate and some of this initial research that we did to understand the potential impact that, tools could have on on the population. Then Paul, and I wanna interject really quick and just say, Tracy sent, Tracy integrate I believe sent a LinkedIn message to then CEO Kevin Parker. So if you're feeling down in the dumps about the current state of things, remember that a lot of this got kicked off because our friend and colleague Tracy said and sent a LinkedIn message. So the power of one person and the ripple effects, my hat always is tipped to Tracy for that initial message. So sorry. I just wanted to double click on that. It's my favorite thing in the story. Go ahead. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for for highlighting that because it it really is. Right? It's it's really it highlights the the power of just reaching out and saying something. Right? You know, hey. I see an issue. Let's talk about it. And that can you know, six years later, here we are talking about it still and have all this to say. So, in 2020 then, we had given integrate, our all essentially, all of our assessment technology at time. We set them up as if they were customer, and we gave them an assessment, and that included our interview based content as well as our game based content. And integrate uses used it then and still uses it today, as part of their process for recruiting, autistic talent for the organization. They don't make hiring decisions with it. They don't pass or fail anybody. It's actually meant to show all of their candidates, essentially modern hiring practices so they get used to it. And they get a little bit of information from it, the candidates get some exposure to it, and it's been a really good process for them because candidates take it very seriously. And that has led us, really into why we're able to do the research that we're able to do. So in 2020, we partnered with our first university, Colorado State University, a faculty member there and two grad students, to bring, Cynthia academic pillar to private industry and our nonprofit partner, Integrates, to start really conducting academic research and, bringing all this back to conferences and to papers that we start contributing to the research. The reason why that was so important is back in 2019 when we started all this, I went through the literature, and looked for anything that could be guidance around, like, what would be a best practice for assessments and neurodiversity, particularly for autistic job seekers, or anything just around what we're doing, and there's essentially no research at at the time. There's, in other words, what we call a scientist, a gap in the literature. These are just a whole set of questions and problems that hadn't really been asked or considered. And when they had been, it was really just, very small qualitative studies, looking at, you know, since you, you know, you know, big, you know, interview type responses to some questions and some what we call thematic analysis. Not enough to really drive, best practices or sort of a state of the art from a science perspective around what should we do about assessments, particularly AI based assessments and neurodiversity. So we found that we are sort of uniquely poised to answer this question, and, that's why we reached out to Power Upstate so that we can really start building, a research program about around these questions. So our first, study comes out, in 2021, and that is what we call our game study. So, through integrate using, our assessment technology, what we, were able to do is collect data around autistic, candidates, playing our games, which are measures of cognitive ability per merely, working memory and spatial reasoning. And we're able to compare that to similar populations in our customers who are hiring people about the same age for similar type types of jobs to see, whether or not there's a difference between, the scores that autistic ants were receiving versus the general population. And we found that there was essentially no difference between the two populations. They looked almost identical to one another, in their gameplay and scores that they're receiving indicating that, like we we would kind of knew all along theoretically from the neurodiversity movement if we really hone in on the skills and the abilities that are required for a job and we remove some of those hiring barriers, we can really get, you know, identical measurement and, you know, know that their candidates are equally qualified for for the jobs that they're applying for. So we applied that, in or published that in Journal of Intelligence, and that was our our first major publication and, really kick started a lot of the interest in the the research that we are conducting. There we go. So what we did next is, of course, we had another set of, assessment content to look at more closely, and we knew this was gonna be a a bigger nut to crack. So we've been having autistic hands go through our interview based assessments as well. Our interview based assessments are, set up, actually in some ways in in terms of best practices for already. Back in twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen, a paper was published that was not related to us about, structured interviewing, and the authors there found that, candidates, autistic candidates who took structured interviews, so in other words, interviews where you're asking same content the same way in the same order, evaluating candidates against a rubric, and then attaching those interview questions to job related content, we're scoring really well on those interviews compared to what we would call unstructured interviews. So it's sort of a you're familiar colloquial kind of conversation with a hiring manager that kind of ebbs and flows. It kind of goes wherever the interviewer wants to, not neuroinclusive. Structured interviewing was found to be very neuroinclusive, and that's something that HireVue has been doing since the beginning with its interview technology. We've also been asking questions that have been designed by IO psychologists to be, really as robust as possible with respect to measuring job related content and avoiding, you know, differences in different populations due to race, ethnicity, age, etcetera. So what we had done with integrate was add a layer to those question design principles that we had for neuro inclusivity, and we had changed our interviews, our interview question content to be neuro inclusive by removing things like sports metaphors and Boolean logic and, hypothetical questions that might tap into theory of mind, issues or executive functioning issues, and we've made our entire question library at this point neuro we would call neuro inclusive. And so we started looking at differences between our old set of questions, questions, and then whether or not, there are differences between the autistic candidates and then the general population. And not surprising, we found that there was a difference. And there's autistic candidates scored lower than the general population here, And we wanted to really understand why, so our partners at Colorado State, did a text based analysis using Luke to really dive into whether or not there were thematic differences in interview responses. And if they there were, could we kind of extrapolate why? Were they saying things that were different between autistic and general population candidates or not? Really the main finding there was candidates were saying very similar things. The major difference was that autistic cancer were saying significantly less. And so they're answering the questions very literally, very directly, and not providing a whole lot of content. So you can imagine, you know, if you're asked a question, you're kinda giving short one word answers or simple sentences that technically answer the question, but aren't fleshing out an answer like you might in a typical interview process. So what would that let us to think about was, you know, could we do anything to really intervene on that, in the spirit of designing more inclusive assessments, more inclusive interviews? We had an opportunity because we at HireVue kind of own the whole interviewing process from initially reaching out to the candidate to scoring the interview at the other end to say, okay. There's there's some things that we can control here. Can we start manipulating experimentally some of those things to see if there's anything that we could kind of identify as a promising practice to really intervene on this problem of autistic cancer saying less than than your typical candidate in the interview process. A lot of this research was based actually upon, individual interaction that Integrate I had with some of their candidates where, they had sort of presented as really competent and intelligent, but we're doing very poorly on the interview. And so I worked with those individuals directly using our behavior and their rating scales to identify gaps in their answers and why they might be answering questions that the way they were, and we saw a significant improvement in doing that. So we hypothesized that if we, kind of did a similar method at scale, we should be able to improve interview responses in general. So we set up the experiment that you see here in those four quadrants. We had a control group, so integrate candidates who were going through the process, as if they're, you know, as standard. We then use a typical combination practice where we just give candidates unlimited time to prepare for an answer of interview questions, similar to, like, having the extended time on a test in an academic setting. We gave candidates, in a different condition what we call enhanced instructions, which are, instructions just about, like, what the interview process is gonna look like, what a good answer includes, how long that answer typically is, some of your advice around, you know, how to sort of structure a a good response to a structured interview question. And then lastly, we gave another group of candidates what we call video examples. We literally show them, what a bad average and high quality interview response looked like. We gave them videos and then, the transcripts of those responses so they can review those prior to taking their own interview. What we found actually, you know, probably not too surprising. We saw actually probably the most surprising thing is our typical combination practice, in in the field is, pretty much either doesn't help at all or maybe slightly hurts candidates. So if you give people too much time, other factors seem to come into play and can actually suppress scores a little bit. So it's not a particularly effective accommodation practice to just give people more time to answer interview questions. But what was really effective was the enhanced instructions and the video examples. Both of those, led to large boosts in scores on the candidates' interview responses compared to our control group. You know, essentially giving candidates that, you know, kind of like just in time training intervention and, setting expectations about what a good interview response looks like. From a neurodiversity perspective, we call that sort of unpacking the hidden curriculum of interviewing was really effective at closing that gap between interview scores, between autistic and and neurotypical candidates. So we got that, that's actually still in the works, before we publish that, but, that's coming pretty soon. In the meantime, we in the last year or so, we've really grown the research team, and we've added, the University of New Hampshire and the Western University of Ontario to our ranks. So now we have a research team of eight individuals, spanning HireVue, Integrate, and our three academic partners. And the one thing I wanna call out here that I still think is, like, the coolest thing is, three of our researchers are openly autistic, and that's really important in any research like this. There's this idea of nothing about us without us. In other words, we wanna have and ask research questions and conduct research with the population that we're studying. Right? So it's not people coming in from outside the community and drawing conclusions and making recommendations about different group of people. It's really, you know, a kind of a community participatory type action research in the sense that we're bringing in people who are autistic, who are neurodivergent as researchers so that we are asking better questions and tailoring everything we do, as if, you know, we're all part of the same community. So really a cool part of our research. I've I've mentioned that every single time I talk about this. And what we're working on now, in addition to what I've just reviewed, is an accommodation study. So I've mentioned a couple of times that, you know, we still need to really know what are good accommodations. We need to move above and beyond just giving people unlimited time or having them skip sections of an interview process or a hiring process. So we are doing a thorough review of the research right now to see what's already out there in terms of best practices for accommodations so that we can set guidance on really how to kind of move that area of the field forward so that as we're doing this really, you know, quantitative accessibility style research, trying to break down hiring barriers, We're also coming out from the other side so we can recommend when we can't make something accessible, what is the best accommodation for that individual. So, with all that said, I will, pass it back over to Chelsea, but I hope you enjoyed that type of overview of our research so far. Thank you so much, Colin. It it is as deep as it is wide. I felt like it is just continuing to grow. We're gonna actually skip this poll question for the sake of time. We've got about twelve minutes left, and I want to give Justine her her time to talk about designing hiring tools to support neurodivergent talent. So, Justine, now that we've got the research grounding, talk to us about, design, please. Oh, you're muted, Justine. Of course, I am. Alright. I'm here. Yeah. We got you. Yeah. So, specifically, in terms of how HireVue and our assessments have been designed with that neurodivergent lens, I'll go through a few examples here without getting into the weeds of it. But one of the things that's really important is around notifying individuals or candidates interview process is going to look like. And, thanks to to HireVue, we're, enabling, candidates to know exactly all the steps along the way. It's clear. It's it's clearly, defined. Whereas in in traditional types of, environments when it comes to, interviewing, there can be a lack of transparency around that. And so that's one of one of the bonuses of of using HireVue. Another thing is around anytime, any place. Right? So time and location is really fully, at the candidate's, decision. Right? So because of the nature of the assessments, it's it's online, it's virtually. They can take it whenever suits them and at whatever location that they are willing to take it at. Another really cool feature is around the practice pause and and redos. We have within our platform the ability to provide candidates, an ability to practice before they actually provide their responses. Right? Usually, in traditional settings, you have to give a response almost immediately. Whereas in in HireVue, you're able to to practice, you know, if there's something or additional points that you would like to add in before you actually give your final response, you have that ability. Positing your your assessment is also, a feature. And finally, the retakes is one where, if you don't feel like you put your best foot forward, you can, be able to retake to make sure that you really feel that what you're, putting forward is is really representative of your your strengths. Well, there you go. And I do like just seeing what you said, like, the things can be nerve wracking anytime, any place. Again, that resonates with me as somebody who's neurotypical. Like, job interviews are super stressful. So you see, once again, this is maybe more important for somebody who's autistic, but it sure does benefit everybody to be able to be in your comfy sweatpants in your home after the kids go to school or whatever to take your video interview. Sorry. Go ahead. 100%. Yep. Definitely seen some interviewers, even in their beds and in pajamas. And, you know, when reality, we really don't care about how you look. It's all about proving and and showing that you're able to do the job. So that that was a a funny but, just representing what we are all about. Something that's also really important here is that we really focus on, making sure that we're looking at things that are relevant to the job and not about the interview. Right? So, Colin already mentioned that hidden curriculum. We're not going to be measuring behaviors that are unrelated to the job, you know, your physical appearance. As I said, if you're in pajama, it will not tell us if you're going to be a good job or a good performer in the job or not. Our assessment's really important as well. They assess for knowledge, skills, abilities, or any other characteristics that we have identified as needed. It's it's evidence based. Right? It's it's collected information through job analysis. Many, many hundreds of job analysis that we've done, across various jobs and industries and and organizations. So we have a really strong understanding of, what is job related and what actually predicts your performance. Something that's also really cool is around job simulation, giving that preview ahead of time to candidates to see if they actually fit for those roles. Right? And and see and and align to whether they, they like what it is to be in in that particular job for that particular organization and see if there's effectively a good job fit. In terms of the content design, as, Colin already mentioned here, there was research around that game based assessment and seeing that neurotypical and, neurodivergent candidates perform similarly in in that cognitive, ability piece. Neuroinclusive questions. Right? So making sure that we're not using jargon, idioms, any colloquial language that could be misleading. And so we actually partnered with Integrate to review our, questions, our behavioral based questions to make sure that they effectively are simple, clear, straight to the point. They don't allow for misinterpretation, and just, enabling those candidates to to give proper responses. The last thing here that's highlighted, is around, providing instructions via written or video. Right? So, in human proctoring, if it's in a traditional setting, there could be inconsistency in terms of those interviewers interviewers providing that kind of guidance. Whereas in in the, the HireVue environment, there's consistency around, the the proctoring. And then a few other points here to mention is the process design. Right? So, as, as we already kind of hinted to, it's all about standardization, making sure that we're we're systematically approaching, the evaluation of our assessments the same way, at scale. Right? Another really cool thing about, our assessments is that we we are or we can refer to ourselves as a comp compensatory model where, there's multiple steps in that process. And so we can use different modalities, to measure different constructs and ultimately, combine that to get a really good holistic view of someone's success profile. There's also an ability to, provide feedback. Right? So in terms of of that insight, making sure that we can let candidates know how, they did, how they can leverage their strengths, And so all really, really cool features. So for those of you that were not familiar or or for new prospects, you can really see that our our platform and our assessments are are really designed with that neurodivergent talent in mind. And last but not least, if we just zoom a little bit, back here. So rather than just seeing things from an assessment perspective or, you know, just hiring, just there's a lot of points within that hiring workflow that we really can be more neuro inclusive. And for the interest of time, I will not go through all of these, but, just as a reminder that, it's it's assessments are absolutely critical. We're we're making sure that we're really tapping into someone's potential, but there's really other touch points along that hiring, process where you can really embed, neuroinclusive, practices as well. Thank you so much. Okay. I am going to actually, we're gonna ask the full question because we've got a few minutes. So I wanna put that on up. The question is, is neuro inclusion a priority in your organization's 2025 hiring strategy? So that's gonna pop up here in just a second. Take a moment to to answer that. But, also, Lauren has another question that I'd like to pose to you, Colin and Justine, which is, do you pre share the specific situations that candidates will be asked to respond to in an AVI? So we we certainly yeah. We we definitely have the ability to prepare some candidates in terms of what to expect for the for the assessment. It could be straight up, examples of what those questions could look like. And even sometimes, you we can say what kind of competencies we're going to be evaluating them on. So it really it's a case by case scenario within organizations, what level of, openness they want to actually share this kind of content. But, certainly, we we can. Yeah. Do you think that that also points to something that I think is really powerful for the attendees on here? You mentioned, like, it's an organizational choice. A lot of this comes down to the organization, and there is a floor and a and a sort of ceiling, and you can determine the ceiling as a leader within your organization. So just like Tracy started this with that message on LinkedIn, you can maybe be the person that says we need to pre share specific situations for ABIs because of this, you know, send them this webinar link. And there's evidence that this is really helpful to getting the best talent in the organization. Okay. Is neuro inclusion a priority in your organization's 2025 hiring strategy? A major priority still emerging, not currently a focus, 27%. Maybe we've changed some hearts and minds here, hopefully. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer that. We are at time. I do want to give us maybe a minute or two if there's any questions that have not been asked. And while folks were maybe noodling on that for a second, Colin, Justine, final thoughts that you wanna leave the group with. Colin, why don't you go first? Yeah. I think the, you know, the big thing that I always come back to talking about this is, you can kinda see this as Justin walked through those product change slides is best practices, that we find in the IO field and for or your organizations really are often the best practices for neuro inclusion. So it's, not often the case where you have to go above and beyond, what you might already be doing to move your organization to the state of the art to be neuroinclusive. Really, that's what you need to focus on is, doing, you know, kind of doing your other best practices. Right? Having a a hiring system that focuses on knowledge, skills, and abilities, training managers to have more effective communication, things like that that will be, really neuro inclusive are also best practices. Thank you, Colin. Justine, what about you? Yeah. I think it's, important to recognize that building neuroinclusive workplaces across that talent life cycle, it's it's not a box to check. Right? And as Colin brought us through the whole journey across these many years, it is ongoing. It's iterative. We can really see this as the analogy of of running a marathon and not a sprint. Right? And that's why HireVue is really committed to this work, not just in theory. It's it's really in practice, and we're always looking for ways to make our assessments more accessible. We're continuing that research now. We have other research ideas in the pipeline. We have great work, that we can do with integrate as well in the future. And so, any of you out there as well, prospects or customers, we we always look to, to, expand the the community and, reinforce our our work in in that area. So, yeah, I I would love to invite everyone that really, believes in this and and wants to make workplaces more inclusive to to reach out. And hopefully, we can, do great work together. Yeah. Please reach out to all of us are on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you. You should see on the bottom of your screen, there's a little chyron there, encouraging you to join us for our next webinar. It's about AI and cheating mitigation. We're gonna be talking about in you know, everything's powered by AI now. What does that do to candidate experience? How do you balance candidate experience with the very real world need to prevent cheating in your hiring process? So if you click on that, it'll take you to the registration page. That is gonna be September 25. Alright. We are at time. Colin, Justine, always great as usual. Thank you for taking the time out of your day. And to everybody that watched, I know you could be anywhere. I appreciate you being here. Thank you for joining us, and we hope to see you at the next one. Thank you. Thank you.