I regularly work with autistic jobseekers who make it to interview after interview, and I watch them be told they were "so close."

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These are candidates who are qualified, organised, reliable, and often exceptional on paper. They prepare meticulously, meet every listed requirement, and demonstrate the exact competencies employers claim to value.

Yet the pattern repeats: shortlisted, interviewed, rejected. When you see this across dozens of clients, the conclusion becomes unavoidable. The problem isn't the people. It's the way employers perceive the hiring system.

Traditional interviews reward a narrow communication style: spontaneous storytelling, rapid social inference, and the ability to perform confidence on demand.

These are not job skills. They are performative neurotypical norms. And when employers rely on open-ended questions like "Tell me about yourself" or "What does education mean to you?" - questions that have nothing to do with the actual duties of a primary school receptionist for example - they aren't assessing capability. They're assessing conformity.

For autistic candidates, these questions feel like traps. They demand instant synthesis, broad abstraction, and a kind of social improvisation that has no bearing on whether someone can manage enrolments, greet families, or run a front office smoothly.

The result is predictable: highly capable autistic applicants make it to interview but are filtered out by a process that privileges style over substance.

I see the human cost of this mismatch every day. Clients come to me exhausted, demoralised, and convinced they've done something wrong. They rehearse scripts. They mask harder. They try to decode unwritten rules that no one will ever explain.

They prepare obsessively. They practice "being normal", only to be told (again) that the employer "really enjoyed meeting them" but is "moving forward with another candidate." Or worse - they hear nothing at all.

After enough cycles of........

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