How two women — one neurodiversity consultant, one recruiter — are challenging everything we thought we knew about hiring
A conversation between Tania Martin and Sarah McKenna
There is a moment in almost every conversation about neurodiversity when someone pauses, chooses their words carefully, and admits they are not entirely sure they are saying the right thing. It happened within the first thirty seconds when Tania Martin and Sarah McKenna sat down to talk.
Sarah, an HR recruitment specialist in her ninth year of running her own business across the North East and Yorkshire, was the first to name it. She works with neurodiversity daily in her recruitment practice. But she still hesitated. “I’ve got my understanding, but I’m always really hesitant to share my thoughts until I know I’m on the right lines,” she said.
Tania, the founder of PegSquared and one of the UK’s leading neuro-inclusion consultants, did not try to reassure her with platitudes. Instead, she recognised it. That hesitancy, she said, is one of the biggest obstacles organisations face. Not hostility. Not ignorance. Just a quiet uncertainty that keeps people from starting the conversation at all.
What followed over the next hour was anything but hesitant. It was a frank, occasionally funny, deeply personal exchange between two women who approach the same problem from different angles — and keep arriving at the same conclusions.
Two careers, one intersection
Tania Martin spent the best part of two decades in professional services. She started at Michael Page, moved into internal recruitment, and eventually found herself at KPMG and then EY, working across hiring, operational roles, and team leadership. About five years ago, she was offered an opportunity that would change the direction of her career entirely: setting up the UK’s first Neuro-Diverse Centre of Excellence at EY.
It was, by her own admission, a role she walked into carrying the same assumptions most people hold. “I don’t know what neurodiversity is,” she remembers thinking. “I had probably the stereotypes most people carry around.” She decided to educate herself, enrolling in courses on specific learning difficulties and autism. Partway through the first course, something clicked. “Oh my goodness me,” she thought. “This is me.” She was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 42.
Sarah McKenna’s route was different but led to a similar place. A career recruiter who also offers consultancy through her own recruitment review framework, she has spent years working with HR professionals and hiring managers across a wide range of industries. Over that time, she has watched the conversation around neurodiversity evolve – and has become increasingly aware of just how much recruitment practices need to catch up.
“The awareness of neurodiversity 10 – 15 years ago just wasn’t there,” she said. “Once you know, you do better. And I think that’s where a lot of organisations are right now – they know they need to do better, but they’re not sure where to start.”
Building the anti-recruitment process
At EY, Tania found herself leading a team of neurodivergent technologists -individuals who were severely dyslexic, autistic, ADHD, dyspraxic – and the experience fundamentally changed how she understood the workplace. Not in the abstract, theoretical way that training courses deliver, but in the practical, sometimes bruising reality of daily working life.
“The challenges that show up can sometimes be some of the simplest things that workplaces just completely take for granted,” she explained. One of the most valuable exercises the team undertook was pulling apart the very recruitment process they had been through. For two hours, they went through it step by step: “that didn’t work, that didn’t work, that didn’t work.”
What surprised Tania was how often her own assumptions were wrong. She had assumed, for instance, that submitting a CV would be a major barrier for someone with severe dyslexia. It was not. As one team member pointed out, having a CV is expected – so he had always had one. The real barriers were elsewhere, in places Tania would never have thought to look without asking.
When she took the team’s feedback to EY’s head of experienced hire, the response was memorable. “Basically what you’re asking of me is to put together an anti-recruitment process.” Tania laughed. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m asking for.” The rebuilt process went on to win two RAD awards for innovation and candidate engagement.
Sarah echoed this from her own consultancy work. She has built a recruitment review framework that examines every stage of the hiring process, and her experience is that the instinct to bolt on changes – rather than genuinely rethink the process – rarely works. “Rather than trying to bolt on changes at certain points to try and look like they’re being more inclusive, it doesn’t work,” she said. “But obviously asking people to completely overhaul their recruitment process for the greater good isn’t an easy conversation to have either.”
The changes that actually matter are embarrassingly simple
If there is a single message that both women wanted to land, it is this: the adjustments that make recruitment neuro-inclusive are not the enormous, budget-consuming overhauls that organisations fear. They are, more often than not, embarrassingly straightforward.
Tania has since built a recruitment audit tool that covers ten areas of the hiring lifecycle, from employer branding through to onboarding. Its purpose is not to overwhelm but to surface quick wins. “Some of the things are as simple as making sure your interview rooms are quiet, have natural light, and are away from the hustle and bustle,” she said. “How many people still interview in a coffee shop? ‘Let’s just meet for a coffee.’ How difficult is that for somebody who’s potentially got a sensory processing challenge?”
Sarah raised a related issue that comes up regularly in her recruitment work: timed psychometric tests. Too often, she sees organisations use assessments where candidates are not expected to finish or reach full marks — but nobody tells them that. “What is the purpose of making somebody feel like they’ve failed when that’s not how it’s scored?” she asked. The anxiety created by that disconnect is significant — and entirely avoidable.
Tania’s answer was typically direct. Just tell them. “If you’re going to make them do it, tell them up front that you’re not expecting them to finish. That person walks out going, ‘Okay, I didn’t finish it, but that’s okay,’ as opposed to walking out going, ‘ I’ve completely messed this up.’”
It is, she said, always about communication.
No news is still news
Communication is not a section of the recruitment process. It is the recruitment process. Both Tania and Sarah kept circling back to this point from different directions.
Tania told the story of an autistic candidate who struggled with ambiguity. He was the seventh person they wanted to hire into a cohort of six, which meant his role needed additional internal sign-off. Rather than leaving him in limbo, Tania put in a 15-minute call every fortnight. Some of those calls had no news at all.
“I literally have no update for you,” she would say, “but we’re still here, we’re still talking to you, we still want to be talking to you.” It was a small investment of time. It was enormous for the candidate.
Sarah recognised this pattern instantly. In her experience as a recruiter, the gap between offer acceptance and start date is where far too many organisations go silent. Candidates hear nothing beyond the basics — a start date, perhaps some forms to fill in — and are left to sit with their own uncertainty. “The businesses who reach out during that period — who invite people in to meet the team, see where they’ll be sitting, join a team lunch — the difference it makes in how comfortable that person is when they join is just so noticeable,” she said. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes it’s just these really small touchpoints.”
Tania added a layer that organisations rarely consider. A pre-start visit is a nice thing to do for anyone. For an autistic individual, it can be essential. They may need to know the route, what the building looks like from the outside, where the lifts are, which floor they are going to. Without that familiarity, the first day of a new job carries a weight of logistical anxiety that sits on top of the usual nerves.
When a preference becomes a barrier
One of the most useful ideas to emerge from the conversation was Tania’s distinction between preferences and disabling barriers. Everyone, she pointed out, has preferences – whether they like long emails or short ones, whether they want an agenda in advance or prefer to turn up and talk. These are normal variations in how people work.
“But the reality is that for some individuals, what we see as a preference might actually be disabling,” she said. “And that’s the difference.” The challenge for organisations is that they cannot always tell which is which from the outside. This is why creating space for people to talk about how they work — openly, without judgement — matters so much.
Sarah’s instinct here was practical. You cannot build a bespoke process for every individual, but you can offer choice. “It’s not about adapting to everyone,” she said. “It’s giving options. Sometimes it’s enough for somebody to be given an A or B – which way would you feel more comfortable being assessed?” She also stressed the importance of ensuring that whatever assessment method is used, it genuinely reflects the skills the job requires. “If it doesn’t relate to the role, why are you asking them to do it?”
The typing test that tested the wrong thing
Tania shared a story that illustrated the real cost of getting assessments wrong. An organisation had recently recruited someone who disclosed a neurodivergent condition during the process. The job required listening and typing simultaneously. The assessment tested typing – but from a static script, not from live audio. The candidate passed. She started the job. She could not do it.
“They didn’t make any adjustments. They didn’t ask any questions about challenges this individual might have,” Tania said. “Now the organisation has someone in training who is probably not going to make it through. There are serious implications of getting it wrong and ignoring when somebody has ticked a box to say, ‘I’m neurodivergent and this is what that is.’”
It was a story that cut both ways. The candidate was let down. The organisation wasted time and money. Nobody won.
The courage it takes to say “I can’t do that”
Both women acknowledged that inclusion is not a one-way street. Organisations have a responsibility to create psychological safety, but individuals also need to be able to articulate what they need. In a performance-driven culture, that is easier said than done.
“Who sticks their hand up and goes, ‘I can’t do that’?” Tania asked. “It’s hard. And when you have to do it because actually the process is disabling you, that’s even harder. So sometimes it’s just easier to mask, to fit, to try.”
Sarah sees this tension regularly in her work. Employees who struggle with certain aspects of a role will often try to fit within the brief rather than speak up about what needs to change. Sometimes they leave before that conversation ever happens. “How do you create that environment where people feel trusted enough to share early on?” she asked. “That’s the question every organisation should be asking.”
Tania’s view is that organisations can start building that trust before a candidate even applies. “Google your company name and neurodiversity and see what comes up,” she suggested. Beyond that, there are signals an organisation can send – inclusive language on job descriptions, visible neurodiversity statements, and crucially, stories. Leaders who are open about their own neurodivergent journeys create a sense of permission for others to do the same.
For Tania personally, the most freeing part of her ADHD diagnosis was accepting that there were simply some things she could not do well. “There are some things that either I need to ask for help, or I need to delegate, or I need to find a coping strategy. And be okay with that, rather than try and fix it, try and fit, try and hide it.”
The gatekeeper problem
Sarah raised a point that is often overlooked: the role of recruitment agencies as gatekeepers. The quality of a candidate’s experience often begins not with the hiring organisation, but with the recruiter who first picks up the phone. And not all recruiters are approaching that conversation with neurodiversity in mind.
“The benefit and the strength of using a good recruiter is that they get information from both sides and translate it,” Sarah explained. “But if a recruiter isn’t there, how does the organisation create that for itself? How do you ask the right questions so people give you the information they would normally share with someone they trust?”
She was candid about the wider industry too. Not every recruitment business operates with inclusion front of mind. “In a big national agency, you don’t always have the luxury of saying no. You’ve got to fill the job,” she acknowledged. For Sarah, the priority has always been different: get the right person into the right role, where they will genuinely thrive, and the results follow.
Tania picked up the thread. How many organisations, she asked, have actually audited how their recruitment suppliers think about neurodiversity? “If organisations supplying candidates into companies are not doing that in a diverse way, then they’re creating the barrier even before the candidate can get through the door.”
She also pointed to something more uncomfortable: the hiring practices that many managers were taught early in their careers and have never questioned since. “Eye contact. Clear and concise communication. These were things I was taught as a recruiter very early on. How many hiring managers have not moved away from those concepts?”
Nobody recruits people to fail
By the end of the conversation, something had become clear. These two women, coming from different professional worlds – one a neurodiversity specialist, one a frontline recruiter – were not describing two different problems. They were describing the same one, seen from two angles.
The recruitment process, as most organisations run it, was not designed to exclude neurodivergent people. It just was not designed with them in mind. And the gap between the two is where talent falls through.
Sarah put it simply: “Nobody recruits staff for them to fail. Nobody recruits staff for them not to be able to do their job. Making those adaptations early on is successful for everyone.”
And Tania’s closing thought was one that should sit with every organisation currently wondering where to start: “It genuinely isn’t big changes that we’re asking organisations to do. It is just about creating that safe space where people feel like they’ve been heard, understood and supported – regardless of the way that their brain works.”
About the contributors
Tania Martin is the founder of PegSquared, a neuro-inclusion consultancy specialising in training, consulting, speaking and coaching. A former People Lead of EY’s award-winning UK Neuro-Diverse Centre of Excellence, Tania helps organisations understand neurodiversity by coming at it from a leader’s perspective, underpinned by 20+ years of corporate experience and her own lived experience of ADHD. PegSquared is currently launching the UK’s first benchmarking survey on neuro-inclusive recruitment. To find out more or take the free self-assessment contact Tania at tania@pegsquared.co.uk or visit pegsquared.co.uk for more information on PegSquared’s services.
Sarah McKenna is an HR recruitment specialist in her ninth year of business, covering the North East and Yorkshire. Alongside her recruitment work, Sarah offers consultancy through her recruitment review framework, helping businesses rebuild their hiring processes from the ground up. To discuss how a recruitment review could support your organisation, get in touch with Sarah directly: sarahmckennahr.co.uk
