Meet the Specialisterne Australia Team
Natalie Hall, Talent Recruitment Consultant
What is your background before you came to Specialisterne Australia?
Before Specialisterne Australia, I worked with large organisations to place people with disabilities into employment. I've always worked with people with disabilities all my life. I’ve had 30 years of experience in various roles.
What is your role at Specialisterne Australia? What do your day-to-day responsibilities look like in the role?
I'm part of the Inclusive Talent team for Specialisterne Australia. My tasks are to create recruitment programs, stakeholder management and manage candidates through the recruitment process.
I've been very busy with candidate sourcing for a role that I’m trying to fill at the moment. I assess each of those candidates’ suitability for the position. I've created a scoring matrix that ensures that we're all assessing candidates in an equitable way. We do thorough research into each candidate.
We have five candidates moving through to the next stage to what we call the workplace insights session. But there are two candidates who have some of the skills, but they are missing other skills. However, we try to offer opportunities for these candidates to showcase what their current skills are as well as identify those areas that they need to upskill in.
We don't use resumes, but we use talent profiles instead. All the information that we've gathered about candidates’ suitability for a role goes into this talent profile. We provide this to line managers so they have a full overview of that candidate because we don't just incorporate education and skills, but we also look at hobbies and tasks that they like doing as well.
Once we've done the workplace insight session with the line managers, we ask them their preferred candidate and help them with the job offers. So, that's when the onboarding starts, which we also provide support with. At that point in our program, our Neurodiversity Coaches work with the successful candidates to develop their Success Plan.
Part of my role is to also deliver training. We deliver training in designing practical assessments, neurodiversity awareness in the workplace, and autism and ADHD in the workplace. This type of training helps organisations on their journey to become truly inclusive.
Why are you passionate about Specialisterne’s mission to enable one million meaningful careers for autistic and neurodivergent people?
Why shouldn't everybody have an opportunity for a career? My passion is to help somebody else. That's what I do, whether it be personally or within the work that I do.
Before I started working with Specialisterne I was seconded to assist with a pilot program with Specialisterne in Brisbane. Within an hour of watching them deliver the program, I turned around to one of the managers and said, “I'm going to be working with you.”
I loved the way that they totally turned the traditional recruitment process on its head. We've still got a lot more training and awareness that needs to go on throughout Australia, and in fact throughout the world, but we are making headway in this space.
What frustrates me and makes me sad sometimes is some of the stories that I hear about our candidates' experiences about the way that they've been treated. It should not happen.
What we do doesn't just make a difference for that one candidate, but it has a ripple effect for everyone else. It’s not just about getting the job and having financial stability, it’s also about social connections that are made.
What are your tips for employers who are looking to hire autistic and neurodivergent people into the workforce?
They need to make sure that their workforce has neurodiversity training, and that has to come from the CEOs through to all managers and staff.
If employers have that understanding, that's where internal processes can start changing. We want recruitment to be accessible to all where people don't have to disclose that they've got a diagnosis or they've got a disability.
If there's an accommodation that needs to be made, whether you're neurodivergent or you're neurotypical, it needs to be standardised. If organisations can start getting that understanding and awareness of different talents and the way that people perceive the world, that will have a knock-on effect, improving their internal recruitment processes.
What are your tips for autistic and neurodivergent jobseekers who want to thrive in their careers?
We really encourage candidates to just do their best, but also apply for roles that are in line with their skill sets, education and things that they’re interested in.
If they can get into a role that they really like doing, that's one of the things that will help them thrive.
It’s also important to seek out support if they are having challenges within the workplace or challenges starting out on their employment journey.
Look for organisations that specialise in supporting neurodivergent individuals into employment. And don’t forget to keep upskilling yourself as well.
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