Different For Hire

A companion to Season 1 episodes 4 and 5 of Different at Work. Flo and I spent two episodes on the job search because we couldn’t fit it into one. This is the written version, with the research we cited, the strategies we actually landed on, and a few things I only figured out after we stopped recording.

I know I am not alone in this, but I have never once enjoyed applying for jobs. That includes internal transfers/promotions and the even more arduous task of finding a totally new employer. That’s not a direct complaint about the current job market, though the market is doing its part. After all, this process was never fun even in the best of times. Rather, it’s a statement about what the process asks of a brain like mine, and about the twenty-odd years I spent thinking the problem was just me.

Thankfully, I’ve only had to seriously face this beast a few times in my working life, most recently a couple of years ago and, not coincidentally, a few months before I decided to hire myself out to paying clients via A Sanders LLC. I found myself spending several hours researching a company, deciding I liked them and wanting to be considered for a job offering, only to have some invisible force prevent me from tossing my hat in the ring. If I had a paycheck for the number of postings that I saved for later, only to return after the posting expired, I probably wouldn’t need a job for the rest of my working years.  This and my school experience are what ultimately led me to seek evaluation by a professional, which unlocked so many answers when the diagnosis was in: ADHD.

The job market and the rituals we subject ourselves to in the search for employment- somewhere to dedicate our time and talent- is simply not built for neurodivergent brains. Unfortunately, with little say over how the process plays out, it’s yet another thing that we have to learn how to navigate while being wired a little differently.

Here’s the arithmetic that got Flo and me started. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 6.9 million people unemployed and looking for work in July. The CDC’s latest survey puts current adult ADHD diagnoses at 6% of US adults, about one in sixteen, and if you widen the lens to every kind of neurodivergence, the most-cited estimate in the workplace literature is 15–20% of the population. Pick whichever number you trust; the smallest of them is still hundreds of thousands of people running a gauntlet that was designed, in every detail, for a brain that isn’t theirs. (On the podcast we said “20% of the population has ADHD or another neurodivergence.” The honest version is that ADHD alone is closer to 6%, and 20% is the ceiling for all neurodivergence combined.)

And that is diagnosed adults: people that were either diagnosed as a child or somehow remembered to make an appointment, then magically remembered to go to that appointment, while having a brain that doesn’t respect time boundaries for such things. Personally, it took me a couple of years between suspecting there was an issue and remembering to do something about it. So I suspect the numbers might be a tad higher, if not unquantifiable. That’s a lot of people! A lot of high performing, excellent workers with strong potential that companies are missing out on. (Ok, checking my ego again here, but you get the point.)

The job search gauntlet has consequences beyond just the individual. In the UK, where the statistics office actually tracks this, 34% of autistic adults are currently employed compared with 82% of non-disabled adults. Nobody has good US numbers, which tells you something on its own.

So this topic is for the person staring at a job board who can’t make themselves click apply. I was that person, before my diagnosis, without the vocabulary to explain to anyone (including me) why a task that everyone else found merely unpleasant felt physically impossible. None of the traditional advice works where there’s an invisible force fighting you every step of the way.

Why “Just Apply Everywhere” Doesn’t Work On Me

In one camp, the standard advice is that job posting is a numbers game: polish the resume, apply to everything you are qualified for, expect a 2% hit rate, keep going- you’re doing great. For a lot of people that’s fine advice. For me it’s advice to run a marathon on a treadmill facing a wall.

The ADHD brain runs on what clinicians call an interest-based nervous system. Motivation doesn’t come from importance; it comes from novelty, urgency, challenge, and reward. The job search has exactly none of those until the very end, and the end is weeks away. Each application is a small, effortful, detail-heavy task with no feedback loop. There’s no reward for simply applying, no hit of dopamine for doing the thing. Silence and “no feedback” is the single most demotivating condition you can put in front of a brain like mine. Rejection would at least be information. Silence is a void, and my brain treats a void as a verdict, with plenty of room to contain all the random thoughts I have in the meantime. Add to that my need to research each position and assess whether the company’s culture and values match and support my individual values and needs, and the time math just doesn’t work- it’s a lot of time for a 2% take with no reward.

Layer rejection sensitivity on top. If you’ve heard the term RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria), know that it isn’t a diagnosis; it’s not in the DSM, and researchers are still mapping it. The science on it is still evolving but the underlying thing is well documented: a review in the American Journal of Psychiatry estimates that somewhere between 25% and 70% of people with ADHD, depending on age, have significant difficulty regulating emotion, showing up as hypervigilance to social threat and outsized reactions to perceived criticism. A recent qualitative study of adults with ADHD found three consistent themes in how rejection sensitivity is experienced: withdrawal, masking, and physical sensation. Every one of those has a job-search translation. Withdrawal is the browser tab you close or the saved job you never apply to. Masking is the cover letter written in a voice that isn’t yours. The bodily sensation is what happens when you hit “submit,” when you feel gut-punched by the automated rejection, or interpret an innocent question about your resume as a criticism slapped across your face.

Now multiply by dozens of applications. The numbers game isn’t a strategy for us; it’s a schedule of exposure to the exact stimulus our nervous system is worst at absorbing. It only makes the problem worse.

The Networking Advice, And Why It Made Me Feel Guilty

The other standard advice is that jobs come from relationships, not applications: the “shadow job market,” where roles are filled through networks before they’re ever posted. This is true. I was on the hiring end of this, and I know it is true, even in places that have structured processes to blunt its impact. It’s also the advice I found hardest to take, for a reason it took me an embarrassingly long time to name.

A lot of us with ADHD carry a heightened sense of empathy and a strong fairness instinct. (Both make sense if you grew up different and spent years reading rooms to survive them.) Asking my network for help felt like cutting a line. There were people who needed the work more. Someone else would be a better fit. I could construct a very principled case for not sending the email, and it was only later that I noticed how conveniently the principle protected me from the pain of asking. Also, another opportunity for RSD to punch me again… what if I asked for help and the people I respected did not respect me back? The horror! Asking for help building connections could expose some real vulnerabilities.

As a society we say we hate nepotism and cronyism, and then we tell job seekers that relationships and referrals are the only way in. For someone whose sense of justice runs binary, that’s not a mixed message; it’s a contradiction, and contradictions are hard to act on. Surfing a wave of hypocrisy just doesn’t seem like a real, viable option to me.

And that’s before we get to the room. Every in-person networking event is a masking marathon: small talk, eye contact, the hobby question. (I don’t have hobbies. I have a sequence of former hobbies with related accessories collecting dust in my garage. My hobby is acquiring hobbies and avoiding any discussion of hobbies.) Flo pointed out something I hadn’t considered: the person who walks into that room to find work is already at a power disadvantage, and someone with a direct communication style, who’d rather just ask “are you hiring?” than perform the forty-minute dance that’s supposed to lead there, is doing a second job of code-switching on top of the first.

None of this means don’t network. It means the standard advice needs to be rebuilt for the person receiving it. More on that below.

The Interview Was Designed By Someone Like Me, For Someone Like Them

Here’s my confession, which I also made on the air: I was a hiring manager for years, and I asked terrible questions.

My favorite was “explain the internet to someone who’s never seen a computer.” I loved it because it made people think on their feet, was somewhat related to the production support roles the jobs entailed, and there was no wrong answer which allowed the candidate some creativity and personality. What I didn’t understand was that “think on your feet” is a specific cognitive style, that a literal thinker would answer the question I asked rather than the question I meant, and that I was, in effect, screening for people who processed the way I did. I built a mini-me filter and called it rigor. I was proud of the gating that I was doing. (See also: riding a wave of hypocrisy.)

Behavioral questions have the same trap. “Tell me about a time you handled conflict” comes with an unspoken expectation: situation, task, action, result, in that order, about three minutes long, with a redemptive ending. A candidate who answers the literal question, briefly and honestly, has failed a test that was never stated. Flo’s line was the right one: a bad answer to that question tells you nothing about the candidate; it only tells you the question was bad. Similarly, a great answer to that question only means you have a great interview performer that likely rehearsed the question a million times. It doesn’t mean you’re actually getting an employee great at handling conflict.

The research is unusually clear on what works instead. The most comprehensive re-analysis of hiring methods in decades, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2022, found that structured interviews (same questions, same order, scored against a rubric) are the single best predictor of job performance, with job knowledge tests and work samples close behind. Unstructured “let’s just chat” interviews, the kind that reward charm and eye contact, sit well down the list. This matters for everyone, but it matters most for the candidate who can do the job brilliantly and interviews badly, because a work sample lets them show rather than perform.

Which brings me to the two words every neurodivergent candidate should be suspicious of: culture fit. There is a real version, where a small founder-led company genuinely needs someone who’ll thrive in a close-knit, low-process environment. And there’s the version that’s code for “I didn’t like them,” where the thing that wasn’t liked was a communication style that had nothing to do with the work. The tell is whether the interviewer can name the actual job-relevant behavior. If they can’t, it isn’t fit. It’s affinity bias with a nicer name.

To Disclose Or Not To Disclose

This is the question that nearly knocked me out of my chair when Flo raised it, because my gut answer was an immediate and total no. (The words in my head were a little more… forceful.)

My reasoning: the hiring process isn’t inclusive by design; it’s exclusive by design. Every stage exists to shrink the pool. Handing a screener a reason to shrink it further, before they’ve seen what you can do, felt like a gift to the wrong person. And once that bell is rung, it stays rung and you’re the ‘ADHD guy’ forever and always.

Flo’s counter: if you’re contorting yourself to hide how your brain works in order to get a job, you’re auditioning for a job where you’ll have to keep contorting. That’s a ticket to burnout, and I have been on that train. That is just asking for more of what, possibly, led you to the job search to begin with. (Or, at least, will likely lead you back there again soon.) Disclosure at the interview stage is partly a screening tool for you. It is your chance to see how the potential employer would support your emotional health and psychological safety. Remember, interviews are as much about you interviewing them to see if they are a match as much as they are about them getting to know you. It has to be the right fit both ways for it to work out well for everyone.

Flo also brought research to it. A 2025 study in Work, Employment and Society surveyed 324 neurodivergent students and interviewed 25 neurodivergent working adults in France. The finding that stayed with me: neurodivergent people feel pervasive pressure to conform to neurotypical norms, and their dominant strategy is to mask and manage the challenges alone, which the authors flag as unsustainable over time. Students often have formal support systems while they are in school. Workers largely don’t have much beyond a third-party EAP program or mental health benefits that seem like an afterthought, and they rarely see anyone above them modeling openness, so the reluctance to ask compounds. If that’s true of employees, it’s doubly true of candidates, who aren’t even inside the building yet.

To be perfectly clear, we are not telling you to disclose or not to disclose your diagnosis in the interview process (or at work). We’re simply suggesting it as something to consider, so that you can make it a decision instead of a reflex. Some things that should feed the decision:

• Who you’re talking to. A recruiter’s job is to get qualified candidates in front of the hiring manager; they’re often in your corner. But what they hear can travel, and you don’t control where.
• What you’d actually be asking for. Disclosure without a request is a label. Disclosure with a request (“I do my best work with written follow-ups; can I get the questions in advance?”) is information the interviewer can act on. Note that many of those requests can be made without naming a diagnosis at all.
• What the company has already told you. Read past the values page. Look at where they spend their money, what they sponsor, how they talk about flexibility, and whether anyone at the top has ever been open about anything. Glassdoor is a complaint box, so weight it accordingly, but talk to people who work there, asynchronously if that’s easier. Check out their stance on corporate social responsibility and the causes they support.
• The bell. It doesn’t unring. Make sure you’d be fine if everyone in the process knew.

What Actually Helps

Strategies, in roughly the order I’d try them for myself:

• Time-box the search, then time-box something that isn’t the search.
  Flo’s coaching approach: one hour of applications, then put it away and spend two on something that interests you. Reward that hour with something fun. That isn’t slacking; it’s refueling a brain that runs on interest. The ADHD version of the numbers game is sustaining progress over a period of time and prioritizing sustained momentum over a count of applications, because a search you abandon in week three has a hit rate of exactly 0%.
• Be selective on purpose.
  I’ve always known I couldn’t apply to just anything, because culture and autonomy matter to me more than they’re supposed to. Before my diagnosis I thought that was a character flaw, elitism, or some sort of denial. Now I know it’s boundary-setting for a brain that will pay a steep price in the wrong environment. Fewer, better-matched applications also mean fewer rejections to metabolize.
• Body double the parts you dread.
  Body doubling is having another person present while you do a hard thing. It sounds too simple to work and it works anyway. Apply alongside a friend. Go to the networking event with someone and agree to stay thirty minutes before either of you is allowed to retreat to the car. Hire a coach if you can; a good one is a professional body double with a plan. Body doubling can also be done virtually, too.
• Rebuild networking as relationship-building.
  Skip the generic mixer. Pick the meetup that’s about the thing you’re actually interested in, because you’ll show up as yourself, and yourself is the person worth meeting. Count the night a success if it was stimulating, whether or not you left with a card or job prospect. Anyone you did meet, follow up in writing, which is where a lot of us are at our best anyway. (And you know I’m already a fan of asynchronous communication.)
• Practice the rejection, not the answers.
  Everyone tells you to rehearse interview questions. I think the more valuable rehearsal is exposure. Have a friend interview you with a blank face and no encouragement, because a hiring manager trying to appear impartial looks exactly like someone who hates your answer, and your nervous system needs to learn the difference in a room where the stakes are zero.
• Ground yourself when it goes sideways.
  Flo works with clients on physical anchoring: hands on the table, feet on the floor, breath, anything that tells the body it’s safe while the mind catastrophizes. It sounds soft. It’s the difference between recovering from a bad question and losing the next four.
• Build a brag book before you need it.
  I still can’t answer “what are your strengths?” cold; my brain files strengths under “things everyone can do” and weaknesses under “evidence.” So I keep a running document of specific things that went well, with numbers where I have them. In the interview I’m not evaluating myself, which I’m bad at; I’m reading from notes, which I’m fine at.
• Be as picky about them as they are about you.
  If the selection process is chaotic, opaque, and hostile, that’s the real job description. The interview is the best-behaved the company will ever be with you. Some people can’t afford to be picky, and I’ve been there too; if you take the job anyway, walk in knowing what you’re walking into and build your strategies for it on day one, not month six.

The Part I Didn’t Say On The Air

I said on the podcast that I’d never disclose in an interview. What I meant was that I never had, because for most of my career there was nothing to disclose. I didn’t have the word for what I was working around. I had a track record of high performance because I was masking and subconsciously working around my ADHD. I just had the occasional “availability concerns” in my file and a private theory that I was lazy in a very specific, high-achieving way.

The job search doesn’t just filter for skills. It filters for a nervous system that can tolerate silence, ambiguity, and rejection at volume, and it calls the people who can’t “unmotivated.” I’d like the next person staring at a job board to have a better theory than I did. It isn’t that you can’t do the job. It’s that the road to the job was built by people who never had to walk it in your shoes, and knowing that, you get to plan the route instead of blaming your feet.

Keep being you. Different at work.

Sources

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation — July 2026: 6.9 million unemployed, 4.1% unemployment rate. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
• Staley BS, et al. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Diagnosis, Treatment, and Telehealth Use in Adults — National Center for Health Statistics Rapid Surveys System, United States, October–November 2023. MMWR 2024;73:890–895. Current adult ADHD diagnosis: 6.0%. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7340a1.htm
• Doyle N. Neurodiversity at work: a biopsychosocial model and the impact on working adults. British Medical Bulletin 2020;135(1):108–125. Neurominorities estimated at 15–20% of the population. https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/135/1/108/5913187
• UK Office for National Statistics, Outcomes for disabled people in the UK, 2024/25: 34.0% of autistic adults in employment vs. 82.0% of non-disabled adults. https://www.autism.org.uk/what-we-do/news/new-data-on-the-autism-employment-gap
• Sackett PR, Zhang C, Berry CM, Lievens F. Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology 2022;107(11):2040–2068. Structured interviews (.42) as the strongest predictor; job knowledge tests (.40) and work samples (.33) ahead of general cognitive ability (.31). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/industrial-and-organizational-psychology/article/revisiting-the-design-of-selection-systems-in-light-of-new-findings-regarding-the-validity-of-widely-used-predictors/A20984B138319E3D432E643978BF026D
• Hennekam S, Kulkarni M, Beatty JE. Neurodivergence and the Persistence of Neurotypical Norms and Inequalities in Educational and Occupational Settings. Work, Employment and Society 2025;39(2):449–469. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/09500170241255050
• Shaw P, et al. Emotion dysregulation in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry 2014;171(3):276–293. Emotion dysregulation in 25–70% of people with ADHD. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2013.13070966
• The lived experience of rejection sensitivity in ADHD — a qualitative exploration. Themes: withdrawal, masking, bodily sensations. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12822938/