Mentioning AS when applying for work in the UK

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I'm applying for jobs in the UK at the moment, and find myself with a quandary. Should I mention having AS?

The way I see it, it could go either way; either they don't know what it is and say "oooh, we don't want a mental", or they do know what it is and think "Ah, that'll be why he had trouble with the phone interview as we did it, let's give him a second chance".

Now, I'm told AS is a recognised disability in the UK and should be taken into account by prospective employers when interviewing candidates. But is that something that works as it should? Is it worth mentioning?

People here have disagreed with me on this before but I'll still say the same thing. You should declare it for the simple reason that if anything goes wrong, you will have evidence to use against them if needed. Keep quiet and they will plead ignorance, probably successfully.

That's one of the things I was thinking about, yeah. Are there any allowances potential employers are required to make in terms of interviewing and the like?

I can't be specific about that but you might be asked or expected to be specific about any areas of difficulty and possibly to make suggestions. If that happens, they might treat any lack of response as an excuse for any failure to accommodate, whether rightly or wrongly, legally or illegally.

Bear in mind that the wording of the Disability Discrimination Act in relation to the employer's responsibility includes the words "be reasonably expected to know". That presents us with a grey area whose boundaries we should be pushing. An employee or prospective employee might be more disabled than they have declared for various reasons. They might not know that they are disabled. They might not know that a particular difficulty they have is a disability. They might suspect a disability but have not succeeded in procuring a diagnosis, whether that is an actual failing of the medical profession or a lack of confidence in that same profession. They might know they have a problem but are too clammed-up to talk about it, possibly through selective mutism or alexithymia (which would mean that merely requiring them to declare might be an act of disability discrimination).

One of the ways that we can push the "be reasonably expected to know" requirement is by referencing prevalence rates. Supposing the rates are 1% for autism, 10% for dyslexia and 25-30% for mental health problems, it is reasonable to expect that the employer should know that each employee or applicant has those degrees of likelihood to have those conditions before actually knowing about them in relation to the person. That should be used against any plea of ignorance by the employer.

Bearing in mind that autistic people are very different from each other but are likely to have several comorbid conditions eg dyslexia, dyspraxia etc, that in turn increases the employer's responsibility to "be reasonably expected to know" in cases where a comorbid condition is of a higher prevalence rate than the autism itself.

I don't know whether you are applying to the public sector or to the private sector or both. If any of your applications are to the public sector, that brings an extra layer of disability legislation which most people probably don't even know about as the employers don't exactly promote awareness of it. I'm referring to the "General Duty" which was introduced in the 2005 DDA. This General Duty goes beyond "reasonable adjustments" by requiring the public sector employer to be proactive in mainstreaming disability awareness into how they operate - their policies, practices and procedures. In principle, one should be able to have their employer done for disability discrimination on the grounds that a work policy constitutes discrimination or that a piece of software is unsuitable for dyslexics etc. In practice, this will never work until enough of the disadvantaged staff are aware both of the legislation and of each other in order to stand together against their management.

The interview that got me thinking was a retail job in the games industry. I had a phone interview that went pretty poorly - my son (4 months old) had been screaming all night and all morning, so I was, shall we say, not at my best. Ended up drawing a complete blank on every single question. It didn't help, of course, that the questions were in many cases ones I couldn't answer:

• "What would you say is your greatest success?" -
• "Tell me about an occasion when you've gone out of your way to help a customer or friend." - I've spent the last ten years as IT manager for my dad's company, living at home in the wilds of Scotland; no customer contact, no contact with anyone really apart from my parents. I mentioned being on call 24/7 for my parents, but that doesn't feel like it should count.
• "Pick a favourite film or book. Now summarise it and sell me on it." - I have over 8000 books at home, and a DVD collection in the hundreds. And I couldn't think of one.

Would it have gone better if I'd asked them to make allowances for the AS? I don't suppose it could have gone much worse... Could they have said "sorry, we don't want nutters", or might they have said "Oh, well, we recognise that could have presented a problem, so we'll cut you some slack"?

Type up a small explaination were you mention some cons, but a bigger part of it should be pros, and dont bother mentioning something that dont apply to you. Mention it during the interview, and leave the pre-typed paper explaining what it is as you say your goodbyes. It could go both ways ofc, but I'm a firm believer in honesty.