S2E2 - why job hunting is harder for neurodivergent people (and what to do about it)
S2E2 - why job hunting is harder for neurodivergent people (and what to do about it)
Transcript
Speaker: Liora Natania
You're already burnt out. You're already doubting your skills because you've internalized years of “we're not doing things right” and “we just have to figure it out”. “We have so much potential if we just apply ourselves”.
So here's what I want you to remember. Doing everything right won't guarantee results. Not because you failed, but because the system wasn't built to recognize your efforts.
Hello, my friend, and welcome back to another episode of the Colorful Futures Podcast. I'm your host, Liora Natania, a neuroqueer HR consultant, career and executive functioning coach, and the founder of Colorful Futures.
Job searching is an emotional rollercoaster, especially for people who struggle with executive functioning and rejection sensitivity. There's a ton of advice out there, and we do the best that we can. We follow all the advice. We tailor our resume. We use the tools we have at our disposal.
There's countless tools now, especially AI supported ones that will help you with making your resume match the job description. There's even tools that will apply to jobs for you. You follow all the advice, you tailor your resume. You use tools like ChatGPT to customize your resume so it matches the job description, and you send out as many applications as your energy and your time can handle.
And then we wait. And we don't hear back, and we just keep going. And the more applications we send, the more we simultaneously get our hopes up that something will come through and get our hopes crushed because we aren't hearing anything back. And then that cues the spirals, whether it's the existential dread or the imposter syndrome or the googling whether you should go back to grad school or googling what jobs people are hiring for. Or wondering if you should just go back to the barista job that you had in high school.
This is especially common for ADHDers and autistic folks who may already be stretched thin just from navigating day-to-day life and the political climate and the world and just everything that weighs on us day to day. When we add searching for a job and a very tough economy and an even tougher job market, all of this can really negatively impact our outlook on life, on ourselves, and just get us stuck in, just really get us stuck.
Let's just start by talking a bit about what executive functioning actually is, because it is a term that we hear a lot, but what does it actually include?
So executive functioning is a set of skills. These skills help us to plan, organize, focus, manage time, and control our emotions. Executive functioning plays a really crucial role in many, many aspects of our day-to-day life. I'm picking up my phone because I wanna refer to my list. There's so many aspects that executive functioning impacts.
So to start planning and prioritizing. So this is basically like what it describes, setting out some steps to achieve a project or a goal and figuring out what comes first. Time management. Do I need to say more? How long do things take? How long have we been working on something? When do we stop all of that.
Organization in general, working memory or the ability to keep track of information in your mind while using it to complete a task. Self-monitoring or keeping track of your own abilities and comparing them to peers.
Impulse control, emotional control. In other words, identifying, understanding, managing, and adapting emotions and emotional states. Task initiation. I don't think I have to explain that one, my friends. Flexibility or the ability to adapt to new situations.
Goal directed persistence, which is working towards goals and following through. Sustained attention and disengaging attention, which is the ability to stay focused on a task and then to withdraw attention to go do something else.
Regulation of processing speed. So in other words, knowing how quickly or slowly to complete a task based on how much of a priority it is. All of those things fall under executive functioning.
I don't know about you, but when I did research on this and I dug deeper into what executive functioning covers, it was kind of mind blowing and thinking back to something I mentioned last week, which is that I'm working through being back on meds after not being on them for two months. It made me realize how much more my medication supports with than just things that I assumed like, task initiation and organization, project management, things like that.
But the emotional piece to it, and even things that I didn't really know were a part of executive dysfunction or executive functioning, like the goal directed persistence or self-monitoring, like keeping track of your own abilities.
Job searching involves so many different parts of executive functioning. The entire process of it from searching to applying, to interviewing, even getting an offer and starting a job can involve executive functioning. We have to find the time to search and figure out how it fits within our day to day, especially if you already have a job or if you might be working multiple jobs and searching for work.
We have to plan what that process looks like. We have to break it down. And prioritize what comes next, what do we do first, we have to self-monitor, understand what our own skills are and how that compares to what our colleagues did at work. We have to keep track of information. We have to use our working memory as we're updating things like our resume or applying and filling out applications or even interviewing.
We have to initiate the task, so we have to not only initiate the task, but work through that attention and be able to focus on it and sit down for a while and do something. We have to then sit down and actually work on the search. So we have to sustain the attention to work on a task that doesn't give us much reward, that is boring and stressful.
And then it's the emotional regulation piece. Which is part of executive functioning as well, where we have to notice and manage our emotions and emotions are high in a job search. I say all of that to simply help bring some awareness to how your brain might work, and hopefully help you understand why the job search feels really difficult and hard to do.
And I see this a lot with the clients that I work with when I'm doing career coaching. So I had this client, we'll call them Jay. Jay felt like they were doing everything right and in a lot of ways they were, but they weren't getting interviews and they weren't really getting any traction on their applications.
They were tailoring their resume for every application by adding keywords from the job description. They were using AI-powered tools like ChatGPT or other resume booster tools to again, make their resume match the job description to be a little bit stronger. They were pulling skills directly from the job description to try to customize their cover letter.
They were looking for hiring managers to reach out to. They were carving out time in their schedule to apply to jobs, spending hours and hours a week, but they weren't hearing back and it was absolutely crushing their confidence. And this is a story that I hear often that you learn all the things, you implement everything, and when you don't hear back, you burn out, essentially.
It's a major hit to your confidence and it's a major hit to that momentum and that motivation to keep going. Jay felt like maybe they were doing it wrong, I'm gonna put doing it wrong in quotes, or like they weren't trying hard enough and when I heard from Jay, what they were doing, I knew that it wasn't a matter of effort.
They were doing everything that we're told to do in a job search. They felt a lot of pressure to sound impressive in their applications and in their cover letters, but they also didn't wanna come across as like, too qualified or too much.
They had a subtle fear that they had failed if they didn't get an interview for a job that they thought was a great fit for their experience. Plus they were having a lot of difficulty pacing the process. They would go through periods of hyper focus and then they would burn out. They would give it their all, and then they couldn't give it anything.
Now, in my coaching approach, I really like to have a strengths-based approach, so focusing on things that are going really well. So, like I said, Jay was doing great with the tools that they had gathered. They learned that optimizing their resume using keywords from the job description was helpful, so they started doing that.
They updated their LinkedIn profile. They were carving out time to submit applications. They were writing great cover letters and repurposing them for other applications whenever they could, and they were trying to connect with hiring managers when they could find them for the companies that they wanted to work with.
A strength-based coaching approach is really helpful, especially for people with low confidence, ADHDers, autistic folks, neurodivergent folks, because statistically it's shown that we, and by we, I mean fellow AuDHDers like myself, but also other neurodivergent folks, we grow up hearing significantly more negative feedback than we do positive.
We go through school and clubs and activities. Even just in day-to-day family life, hearing more about what we're not doing well or that we're doing quote wrong than what is going well. What I found is that through personal experience and coaching others, training others, working with others, is that when you can lead first with what is going really well, then hearing what isn't going well or hearing your opportunities or just things that can be improved, feels more like that person is on your side.
It feels less of a critique and more like, oh, you're telling me this because you care, because you see me, you see the effort I'm putting in. You see the things that I'm trying that are working and you want to help me level up. And it's not just about, you are messing up and these are all the reasons why.
So Jay felt that their efforts were sustainable, but they found themselves getting bored. For ADHDers, we need some sort of feedback loop, some sort of novelty, dopamine. And when you're navigating a job search, there is lots and lots and lots of output and not a lot of feedback, not a lot of results.
We don't really get those dopamine hits. Sure the task is done and the application is sent, but when you're sending so many per week, so many per month, after a while, it doesn't really feel great even when we're sending it, because the only information we have is all of the other tens or hundreds of applications we've sent that didn't go anywhere, and that is like a special kind of hell for an ADHDer, is having to do something over and over and over and over again with no reward to show for it.
Ideally, that reward would be a big one, which would be a job. But even an interview or even an a response could help. And we're seeing less and less of that as the job market gets more competitive.
So what Jay and I did, and what I helped them work through was we zoomed out a little bit. We again acknowledged all the great things that they were doing, and we went into each piece to see what overall are we working with?
So we kind of went back to basics. We made sure that all of their basic application materials were as strong as they could be so that they don't have to revisit it.
So things like their LinkedIn profile, they had started to optimize, but I noticed some small improvements, tweaks that we could make to keep it really personalized, bring more of their personality into it, which they had removed 'cause they weren't sure if that was the right thing to do. So we brought that back in and just made a few little tweaks and that way they didn't have to think about it again.
We went through their cover letters to pick out things that they were doing really, really well and created templates so that they could just rinse and repeat that again and again for each application. Hopefully with taking less time on each of them as time went on.
I find a lot of clients find AI tools to be helpful to kind of shortcut their executive functioning and use it as almost like an executive functioning assistant. And what I found is that while that can be really helpful, we have to be careful when we're using it to customize our resume because it can often be really generic.
And that's what I was noticing in Jay's resume, was that they were doing a great job of implementing that tip, but the way that it was then matching their skills to the job description didn't really leave an impact. That's sort of the first step to it, is matching those keywords from the job description to your resume.
But keywords only get you past any AI-powered application system when they have those sort of filters set up. But once you get past that, a real human is looking at your resume, whether it's the recruiter or a hiring manager, and that's where you need to take the time to add in your own personal impact.
You need real skills and stories and something to share in your resume that helps you stand out. And that's what happened with Jay. Now, this doesn't come naturally to us. Remember I said before, part of executive functioning is assessing your own skills and breaking that down. So what I did with Jay, and this is what I do with a lot of my clients, is we just have a conversation.
We go through the job description, or we go through a general list of skills that the job they're looking for requires and we just talk about it. Tell stories, share little tidbits of what they've done, and that will naturally lend itself to very specific stories, stats, experiences that are unique to you and were unique to Jay that we can incorporate in their resume and their cover letter.
By having conversations about the work that you've done, this creates a lower pressure environment so that you can talk about what you've done without the nerves and pressure of an interview. And you can do this with a friend, a therapist, you don't have to work with a career coach to do this.
This is just one piece of what we offer in our sessions. You can even record voice memos and save them for yourself or send them to a friend and just kind of verbally process. That's really what it comes down to is the verbal processing.
Through the convos that Jay and I had, we actually discovered that they had an entire set of skills that they wanted to use in their next role that they weren't really thinking of as quote, real experience, because it wasn't one of their like formal positions. Or it wasn't really a main part of the job that they had a title for, but that doesn't mean that it's experience that they lack, they had done the work.
Just because it doesn't fit into a box of a formal role doesn't mean it doesn't count, and they weren't counting it. So in these conversations, I helped them realize that that absolutely counted. And so we incorporated a lot more of that in their resume, which was perfect because it aligned with the type of job that they wanted.
And just because you might worry, it's not quote, real experience, doesn't mean it's not relevant. Whether you did that work is a small part of a prior job or in a volunteer position, it's still something that you learned to do, that you did, and you have experience in.
The entire system of hiring, especially in 2025 is confusing, inconsistent, and is often biased. Generic advice like just use keywords doesn't account for nuance, like which keywords would have the most impact and it doesn't account for when you get past that AI-powered application system and you get in front of real human eyes who don't just wanna see keywords but wanna see your story.
They're looking at it through a different lens. And just that process alone of optimizing a resume leans on so many parts of our executive functioning: task initiation, planning and processing, self-monitoring, working memory, sustained attention at the very least. And that's just one part of the process.
And when you are neurodivergent, you're already burnt out, you're already doubting your skills because you've internalized years of “why can't I just insert something here”. It's not just a problem of process, it's a nervous system problem. It's a, your brain doesn't work in a way that these systems were built for problem.
So of course you're spiraling. Of course it's hard to keep showing up when we don't hear back or we keep getting rejected. 'Cause that just continues to reinforce the messages that we've heard for most of our lives, of we're not doing things right and we have to do things differently, or we just have to figure it out. We have so much potential if we just apply ourselves.
So here's what I want you to remember. Doing everything right won't guarantee results. Not because you failed, but because the system wasn't built to recognize your efforts. Historically, the way people have approached hiring is through very specific check boxes.
The good news is, there is a lot of recent information to show that companies are evolving their approach to hiring to be more skills-based versus sort of traditional experience. So we can have some hope. I also want you to remember that you deserve to be seen and recognized for the actual skills and brilliance that you bring, and not just how much you match generic keywords.
And as a final reminder, you don't need to contort yourself into someone else's version of professional, quote unquote, to be worthy and deserving of the job that you want. Being rejected from a job, even one that could be perfect for you is not a moral failing.
You didn't inherently do something wrong if you don't move forward in a hiring process or if you didn't get a job offer. It's really not personal. When we can create that emotional distance from the job search process as much as possible, it can help to soothe the sting of the rejections.
It can help to soothe the part of you that feels rejected, like it has everything to do with your worth and your value because it doesn't. And when we create that emotional distance, it also helps make the process feel more sustainable.
That leads me to our quick tip of the week. What I would love for you to try, and you can start this today, is to make a What I've Already Tried list. When you feel stuck or like nothing is working, I want you to write down in your phone or on a piece of paper in your journal or send a text to your bestie, and I want you to write down the things that you've done. Tailored resumes, updated your LinkedIn profile, added new connections, commented on people's posts, went to a local event to meet some people. Practiced your interviews, did company research.
Sometimes we spiral, not because we haven't done enough, but because we haven't actually taken a moment to recognize what we have done. And in my experience, when we know that we've done what we can, we can realize that we've controlled what we can and everything else is out of our control.
And that can bring you peace of mind because the stuff that's out of our control, that's none of our business. When you can see the evidence in front of you, of what you've actually done, when you externalize and can then view what you've done and not just have it be in your head very easily buried.
The parts of you that feel shame, guilt, and judgment might quiet a bit, might see that you actually have done many things to help support your journey and they might actually pass the mic over to the parts of you that know that you are doing the best you can with what you have. And that you are trying your damn best.
That's all we have for this week, my friends. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you in the next one.