Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

In terms of sharing details of your neurodivergence, this is very much a personal choice.  If you would like to know more about the reasonable adjustment process for the organization you’re applying to, please contact your recruiting organization directly. 
 
The law and guidelines regarding what employers and recruiting organizations should do and need to do to accommodate your requests differ by country, so it is important for you to know the local regulations.  

SHL has a practice test site where you can try out different types of assessments.

If you’re not sure what support to ask for, you can use the free ClearTalents.com site, powered by the Clear Company, to guide you through defining your own support needs. A simple online questionnaire, which is fully accessible, asks if you can be supported using the telephone, for example, or using a computer, pen and paper or traveling to and from assessment processes. Perhaps there are things that could help you perform better in face-to-face meetings such as a reader to explain assessment procedures or an interpreter to help you understand instructions. Whatever your circumstances are, ClearTalents.com will help you identify the support you should ask for in an assessment process. 
 
If you would like to discuss reasonable adjustment options for an upcoming online assessment, please contact the recruiting organization that invited you to take part in the assessment.  
 
Our Candidate Support Team can share details of what kind of accommodations might be available if you fill in an online form on our Candidate Help site – we are committed to supporting neurodivergent candidates.  
 

There are certain adjustments that candidates can make for themselves when they sign in to SHL’s testing platform, e.g., changing the color contrast and font size.

Other adjustments need to be implemented by the recruiting organization, e.g., extra time, and alternative assessments. From an assessment-taking perspective, reasonable adjustments need to be requested by the candidate themselves from the recruiting organization that you’re applying to.  SHL is not involved in the disclosure process.  

In the first instance, reasonable adjustments serve to make an assessment more accessible by making changes to the test experience rather than the test content itself e.g., additional time, breaks between assessments and more.

You can find advice about requesting reasonable adjustments on our Accessibility Support page, including a free tool that helps guide you through defining your own support needs.

SHL has a long history of commitment to inclusion, including: 

  • A member of the Valuable 500: collaborating and connecting with 500 of the world’s most influential global businesses for disability inclusion 
  • A proud partner of Purple: an organization supporting businesses on their journeys to be disability inclusive 
  • A Disability Confident Employer Accreditation: a movement of change, encouraging employers to think differently about disability and take action to improve how they recruit, retain and develop disabled people. 
  • SHL is committed to ensuring that our hiring assessments are inclusive and accessible to the neurodiverse talent pool and has initiated a Neurodiversity Research Program In partnership with client and academic research partners, the goal of the program is to identify how we can best serve a neurodiverse candidate pool. This is an active program of research that aims to investigate the reactions to the assessment experience and preferred adjustments across various test types to inform evidence-based best practices for assessing neurodiverse talent. 

SHL’s goal is to become the market leader in accessibility for talent assessment. We are currently working through a broader audit of our content with our external provider. They are reviewing all our current participant experiences, assessment & interview products as well as candidate-facing feedback to help us baseline what our compliance level is, and where we need to do work. We are taking action to address these findings, as well as the insights emerging from our Neurodiversity Research Program.

Not all candidates are the same and so we do not recommend providing a standard generic list of adjustments for our assessments. Recruiting organizations have the legal obligation to determine what is a reasonable adjustment in the circumstances—the decision is ultimately the recruiting organization’s to make.

SHL recommends following best practices so that when a candidate discloses an accessibility requirement, the recruiting organization ought to have a frank discussion with the candidate about the requirements of the assessment and find out what the candidate feels would make an appropriate adjustment or accommodation. Together they can agree on what would be reasonable. It is also recommended that the recruiting organization should consult its own internal legal counsel.

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Take a full-length practice test to help prepare for an upcoming assessment.

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