CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Charlotte-based Wells Fargo is leading the country in hiring neurodivergent individuals, people whose brains work differently than most.
The company is seeing incredible success with the Wells Fargo Neurodiversity Program that launched in 2020.
According to the National Institute of Health, neurodiversity is most commonly understood in the context of neurodivergent conditions, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Wells Fargo has hired hundreds of applicants who might otherwise have struggled to find jobs, and the bank’s leaders said the company is benefiting just as much as the workers.
The bank said this program isn’t about charity. This is a win-win because it's able to tap into a fantastic talent pool.
"When I came here, I was 27," Wells Fargo employee Alex Lieberman said. "I had a master's degree, and I had never held down a full-time job for more than a month."
Lieberman admits he was living with his parents with not much on the horizon when he got his job at Wells Fargo three years ago.
Lieberman, who is autistic and has ADHD, is a tech consultant at the company, part of the Wells Fargo Neurodiversity Program.
"It feels good to have a future," Lieberman shared. "After a while, I didn’t see myself doing anything ... this gave me a chance to build something for myself, build a way forward to help others build their futures too, a privilege I never thought I’d get."
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Stephen DeStefani runs the program that, so far, has placed almost 300 workers at Wells Fargo in every position, from tech jobs to data analytics roles, finance and more.
"It's really a talent play," DeStefani said. "It's not philanthropy; it's not charity; it is gaining access to an incredibly deep, richly diverse highly skilled talent pool. We see the return on investment ... shouldn’t need a business case to do the right thing, but there is a business case. We are closing skills gaps and employee satisfaction for those that are part of the program is through the roof."
DeStefani said one of the keys is making sure the interview process isn’t a stumbling block and just letting people be themselves.
Vivian Nguyen is a software engineer who is autistic and said her condition was a challenge at previous jobs where she was often told to change the way she interacted with people.
"Things like that have happened in my life whether in the interview process or at work, " Nguyen said. "They never liked me as a person.
Nguyen believes in past interviews, people did not understand that Nguyen was a little different. " [I] wasn’t like them and didn’t follow what we call social protocols and scripts."
But working at Wells Fargo has been a better, more accepting experience for Nguyen.
"We’re here to do work and make things better and I’m empowered to do all those things without letting social protocols get in the way."
"We are all people," Lieberman added. "We think differently than most but we don’t have any more or less value than anyone else, and in a program that acknowledges that we have a chance to contribute in ways that people generally don’t think that we can."
Wells Fargo is sharing their best practices with other companies in hopes that others will follow their lead.
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