What twenty years in recruitment taught me about my child’s future
Some months ago, I sat in a client calibration call. We were reviewing candidates for a senior role, and the hiring manager paused on one profile.
“Technically brilliant,” he said. “But the interview was awkward. Wouldn’t hold eye contact. Kept going too deep into details nobody asked about. Not sure about culture fit.”
We moved on to the next candidate. That is how it works. That is how it has always worked. I have run a recruitment and executive search firm for years; I have sat through hundreds of conversations exactly like that one, and I have nodded along in most of them.
But that evening, driving home, the sentence would not leave me. Wouldn’t hold eye contact. Not sure about culture fit.
Because I am also the parent of an autistic child. And I realised, with a clarity that felt like a physical weight, that the filters I help operate every working day are the same filters that will one day be applied to someone I love more than my own life.
I hold the gate. And my child stands outside it.
The uncomfortable truth from inside the industry
Let me tell you something honestly, as an insider: hiring in India does not measure ability. It measures the performance of ability.
The thirty-minute interview rewards fluency, polish, quick social calibration, comfortable small talk, confident body language. These are proxies. Useful proxies, sometimes — but proxies. I have watched genuinely exceptional people fail interviews because they answered the question that was asked instead of the question that was meant. I have watched mediocre candidates sail through because they performed confidence beautifully.
Now consider what this system does to a person whose brain is wired differently. Someone who does not make eye contact not because they are evasive, but because eye contact is noise that drowns out thought. Someone who takes questions literally. Someone who knows one domain with astonishing depth but cannot manufacture enthusiasm for “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
The system does not screen them out through malice. It screens them out by design — a design nobody ever questioned, because the people it excludes were never in the room when it was built.
When parents in our community worry about their child’s future employment, they often imagine the problem is their child’s abilities. Having spent my career on the other side of the desk, I can tell you: very often, the problem is the doorway, not the person.
What is actually changing — and what is window-dressing
Here is the part where I am supposed to reassure you with a list of corporate neurodiversity programmes. Let me do something more useful and tell you what I actually see from inside the talent industry.
Yes, real programmes exist. Global firms like SAP and Microsoft pioneered structured neurodiversity hiring — work-sample assessments instead of interviews, extended onboarding, trained managers. Some Indian IT majors and global capability centres (GCCs) have begun pilots of their own. When these are done properly, retention and performance data tend to surprise everyone — in a good direction.
But I will also be honest with you: for every genuine programme, there are several that exist mainly for the annual sustainability report. A photograph on World Autism Awareness Day. A hiring target quietly abandoned when the sponsoring leader changes roles. As a parent, you should know the difference exists, so that hope stays anchored to reality.
The genuine shift I see is quieter and more structural: as work becomes more skills-based and less presence-based — more documented, more asynchronous, more remote — the premium on social performance is slowly falling. That trend, more than any programme, is what may reshape the landscape by the time our children are adults.
The spectrum of futures
Now the harder, more loving truth.
Not every autistic adult will enter corporate employment — and I need to say clearly that this is not failure. Our community rightly celebrates the autistic software tester, the data analyst, the artist. But if we hold up only those stories, we quietly tell every other family that their child’s life counts for less.
The realistic range of futures is wide, and every point on it can hold dignity:
- Mainstream employment with accommodations — real, and growing, for some.
- Supported employment — a job coach, a structured role, an employer who understands.
- Assisted and sheltered work — vocational centres, craft units, community enterprises.
- Micro-enterprises built around a strength — a baking unit, a printing service, a plant nursery, often family-anchored.
- Structured, meaningful daily activity — because purpose does not require a payslip.
A guest writer on this blog asked, some months ago, what success really looks like for an autistic child. I want to ask the same question about employment. A recruiter defines a successful placement as the right person in the right role, thriving. By that definition — the only one that ever mattered — a young man who runs the laminating machine at a vocational centre with pride and routine is as successfully “placed” as any vice-president I have ever recruited.
What we can do a decade early
If you will permit a recruiter’s habit: let me end the analysis with an action plan. These are things I have started doing in my own home, and things I wish every parent knew a decade before the question becomes urgent.
1. Build the ability portfolio. A CV is just documented evidence of capability. Start your child’s now — not on paper, but in practice. Photograph the completed puzzle. Note the routines mastered, the tasks finished independently. Over years, this becomes both a record for future employers or centres, and a discipline that trains you to see capability where the world sees deficit.
2. Follow the deep interest, then aim it. The intense, “obsessive” interest that therapists sometimes want to reduce is often the raw material of future work. Trains, numbers, sorting, patterns, music, water, machines — inside almost every deep interest is a task the world pays for. Do not prune the interest. Cultivate it, and slowly attach skills to it.
3. Practise work before work. Employability is mostly rhythm: starting, persisting, finishing, transitioning. Household tasks done to completion, small responsibilities owned end-to-end — these build the muscle years before any job will ask for it.
4. Map the ecosystem early. Visit vocational centres and supported-employment NGOs in your city before you need them. Waiting lists are long; understanding what exists takes time. You would not begin a job search the day the salary stops. Do not begin this search at eighteen.
5. Interrogate the programmes. When a company announces neurodiversity hiring, ask the recruiter’s questions: How many hired last year? How many still employed? Is the interview process actually modified, or is it the same door painted a different colour?
What I ask of my own industry
I want to end by turning away from parents and speaking, for a moment, to my own tribe — the recruiters, the HR heads, the hiring managers whose calendars I live in.
We say “culture fit” and believe we are protecting something. Often we are only protecting sameness. Every time we reject depth because it arrived without eye contact, we do not just fail a candidate. We fail the quiet promise at the heart of our profession — that we find ability wherever it lives.
I think often about the hiring manager my child may sit across from, fifteen years from now. I cannot control who that person will be. But I can spend the years between now and then trying to make sure that when that day comes, the person holding the gate has learned to see.
I hold the gate today. I am learning.
Connect with Arvind Ramani: Email: Ramani.arvind@gmail.com | Phone: +91 9916-999-152
Author, Arvind Ramani is a parent to 2 children on the spectrum, and the co-founder of a boutique talent advisory firm. This article shares personal experience and is not legal or financial advice; please consult qualified professionals for your family’s situation.
