Why autistic candidates often perform worse in interviews than they would in the actual job

Something that comes up consistently when working with autistic job seekers is the gap between interview performance and actual job performance. And it's not a small gap.

Interviews are essentially a test of social performance under pressure. Eye contact, measured enthusiasm, spontaneous small talk, reading implicit cues in real time. These are things that take significant effort for many autistic people to produce on demand, and that effort shows. What the interviewer sees is someone who seems nervous, flat, or hard to read.

What they don't see is how that same person operates once they're actually in the role. Deeply focused, exceptionally thorough, often the person who catches the thing everyone else missed.

The interview format actively filters out a lot of what makes autistic candidates genuinely strong, and selects for things that don't predict job performance particularly well for anyone.

A few things that seem to help. Being upfront about your working style early rather than performing something different. Asking concrete questions about the actual work rather than engaging in the abstract territory. Finding out before you accept whether the team communicates in ways that actually work for you, because discovering it doesn't three weeks in is expensive for everyone.

The interview isn't a fair assessment for a lot of autistic candidates. Knowing that doesn't change the fact that you still have to get through it.

What's worked for you.