Dyslexic job applicant felt ‘worthless’ after recruitment process

A man who applied for a role in a Stormont department has been awarded £15,000 in compensation after it was deemed to have discriminated against him during the recruitment process.

Terry Johnston, who was diagnosed with dyslexia in his 40s, told BBC News NI the experience left him feeling “worthless”.

An industrial tribunal ruled that the Department of Finance failed to make “reasonable adjustments” during its selection tests to take account of Terry’s dyslexia.

In a statement, the Department of Finance said it “notes the outcome of this case and will implement any lessons learned”.

“It does affect your mental health,” Mr Johnston said.

“You don’t sleep, you worry, you think ‘maybe I shouldn’t be doing this.”

“You start making excuses to not be doing the job you’re doing.”

Mr Johnston later got a job in another part of the Civil Service.

The case centred on an application Mr Johnston made for a job as an assistant statistician within the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (Nisra) in 2020.

The selection process required applicants to pass both a numerical and statistics test before they could proceed to the interview stage.

Mr Johnston said he was at a disadvantage during the numerical test due to the linguistic complexity of how the questions were worded.

“When you’re dyslexic, tests like that are very word heavy,” he said.

“The maths in the test is no problem, it’s just the way it’s packaged up in double negatives, triple negatives.

“You couldn’t have devised a more awkward test.”

Mr Johnston, a qualified maths teacher and psychology graduate, requested that he be allowed to sit an alternative numerical test in which the word content was reduced, or be offered a waiver.

When this was refused, he started discrimination proceedings funded by his union.

Mr Johnston had already been in the role on a temporary, agency worker basis for more than two years.

However, he had failed to reach the interview stage for the same staff post in 2017 and 2018 because of his performance in the tests.

He tried again in 2019, but withdrew early because he did not feel Nisra accommodated his needs during the testing process.

In 2020 the department said it would not be in a position to judge if Mr Johnston could do the job if his requests were granted, but it argued that it did offer other adjustments, for example more time.

The tribunal acknowledged that the department did offer some adjustments, but it found that these allowances were ineffective.

It suggested that the department had the opportunity to develop a “word-light” test that would have assessed his numerical skills without disadvantaging on the basis of his language problems.

Mr Johnston said he understood that waiving the test entirely would have been “unfair” on other applicants, but said: “I can’t understand why they didn’t do some other system instead of rigidly sticking to this.”

Employers should try to accomodate people with dyslexia and need to start by educating themselves, another worker with the condition said in response to Mr Johnston’s case.

Sam Marsden, an engineer who was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, has worked for Red Bull F1, founded three start-ups, and now works as a consultant, advising other businesses.

“About half of Red Bull’s staff are dyslexic… places where I worked where there was not a high representation of dyslexic people, you could see that people’s attitudes towards it were different; there was more prejudice; there was more stigma,” he said.

His advice for employers is to “start with self-education.”

“The issue is seeing dyslexia as an inability to read; that viewpoint is the worst thing you can do because dyslexia is not the inability to read; it’s a different way of thinking; it’s a different way the mind is structured,” he said.

“There’s the initial shift of people accepting it not having a stigma around it, which is good; it means you’re not having conflict.

“The next step, the more beneficial thing, would be that understanding of it and understanding the applications of neurodivergence.”