Navigating recruitment while neurodivergent: a qualitative inquiry into job application experiences and inclusive hiring practices

Purpose This study examines how neurodivergent individuals experience and interpret job application and interview processes. It explores the barriers, coping practices and enabling conditions that shape their interactions with prospective employers, and considers how recruitment may be redesigned as a structural rather than individual responsibility. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a phenomenologically informed interpretivist approach, the study integrates narrative interviews with 30 neurodivergent adults who were residing and job-seeking in Portugal and digital ethnographic material from online neurodiversity advocacy communities. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify patterned meanings across individual accounts and community-level discussions of recruitment. Findings Four interconnected dynamics characterised participants' recruitment experiences: the invisible labour of self-presentation; systemic biases embedded in conventional recruitment formats; negotiated dilemmas surrounding disclosure; and preferences for flexible, skills-focused assessment alternatives. Participants described masking, scripting, energy budgeting and calibrated disclosure as practices used to navigate anticipated evaluation, ambiguity and pressure. These demands could entail substantial cognitive and emotional resource expenditure, whereas clear communication, predictable processes, meaningful choice and accessible assessment conditions could reduce unnecessary burdens. Originality/value By documenting the micro-practices through which neurodivergent candidates prepare for, perform in and recover from recruitment encounters – and situating individual narratives alongside community-level sense-making in digital spaces – this study provides phenomenological detail that extends existing barrier-mapping research. It conceptualises recruitment as a pre-employment context in which candidates may incur significant cognitive and emotional resource costs, while developing propositions about how repeated, poorly aligned recruitment encounters may contribute to cumulative depletion and warrant longitudinal investigation. Methodologically, the study combines narrative interviews and digital ethnography to examine recruitment experiences across multiple self-identified neurocognitive profiles in Portugal. The findings inform neuro-inclusive recruitment approaches that reduce reliance on individual adaptation and enable candidates to demonstrate job-relevant competence through more equitable assessment designs.