Why your diversity and inclusion efforts should include neurodiverse workers

Craig Froelich, chief information security officer at Bank of America, talks about hiring neurodiverse workers and how they can benefit cybersecurity teams.

Neurodivergent workers bring pattern recognition and skills that are crucial to enterprises and cybersecurity.

I caught up with Craig Froelich, the chief information security officer at Bank of America, to talk about hiring neurodiverse workers and how they can benefit cybersecurity teams. Here are some of the highlights.

Neurodiversity is part of Bank of America's hiring strategy. Froelich said:

Neuro-diverse people and neurodivergent people have been in our organization for a long time. Neurodiversity is one of those hidden diversity initiatives where there are lots of people who are neuro-diverse. They may be on the autism spectrum. They may have ADHD. They may have dyslexia. And for a long time, they may not necessarily have felt comfortable in being able to talk about that openly because of an associated stigma. So when we first started thinking about neurodiversity and the importance of neurodiversity in order to be able to help solve some of cybersecurity's hardest problems, it was first about making sure that we had an open and honest, courageous conversation in the organization. From there, it was amazing all of the people that would talk about how they wanted to be able to help. And then it was about finding partners in the community, people who knew a lot more about this than I did, to be able to help us understand where to start and what to do.

I think the important thing to understand is it's not a program. It is part of our hiring strategy. And so people who are neurodivergent, they're either are part of our team already, or that we're bringing into the organization, they go through the same hiring practices