It’s pretty well known that people with autism often possess ‘off-the-chart’ abilities when it comes to technology. Indeed, many of them display genius-level IQ ratings and an exceptionally high level of attention to detail.

Now, in order to benefit from this pool of untapped geniuses, many of whom are often overlooked by employers, the German tech company SAP has set out to actively recruit autistic workers. It says that the search has begun for people “who think differently from others”.

SAP currently employs more than 65,000 people worldwide, but by 2020 it’s aiming for one percent of these employees to be autistic, which corresponds to the percentage of people in the world that are affected by the condition. It plans to begin recruiting autistic workers in Canada, Germany and the US later this year, and to do so its teamed up with a Danish organization called Specalisterne that specializes in helping autistic people to find work in the technology industry. SAP said that the move comes following a successful pilot scheme in India, where it hired six autistic people to work as software testers at its Bangalore facility. The company said that their employment led to a noticeable increase in productivity.

Autism as a condition was relatively unheard of until Dustin Hoffman’s hit movie Rain Man lifted it into the public spotlight. In the movie, Hoffman plays the autistic brother of actor Tom Cruise, and displays exceptional recall and calculation abilities, which are just two of the advanced mental traits common in autistic people.

These are just the kind of abilities that SAP wants to exploit, as its spokesman Hilmar Schepp explains:

“What we saw in the pilots is that people with autism have fantastic strengths in IT-related matters, software development, testing and quality assurance. We found that they can focus on specific topics and are really eager to find mistakes.

Equally, people with autism display a natural ability to simplify complex problems in order to solve them – thinking “outside the box”, so to speak:

“If you’re working in app development, you really need to focus on easy-to-use interfaces, one or two clicks to get the result”, adds Schepp.

Why Are Autistic People Better at IT?

Autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) refers to a range of developmental disorders that are known to cause difficulties with social interaction, and unusual or repetitive thought patterns and behavior. Some autistic people are classified as “low-functioning”, which means that they find it difficult to communicate and process information.

However, at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are “high-functioning” sufferers who display enhanced cognitive abilities that allow them to vastly outperform people not affected by autism. Famous individuals who are believed to have had “high-functioning” autism include Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, among others.  Studies have shown that one of the most common traits inherent in high-functioning individuals is their enhanced ability to process and remember data, just as Hoffman’s character in Rain Man could.

These traits are seen as being extremely valuable by the IT sector, which explains why it employs a higher than average proportion of autistic people. In a study last year carried out by the University College London, 16 autistic adults and 16 adults without any autistic condition were asked to carry out tasks designed to assess their “perceptual load capacity”. During the early stages of the task, both groups performed the tasks successfully, yet when the tasks became more difficult, autistic adults vastly outperformed those without autism.

According to the researchers, their study proves that autistic people are able to process much greater amounts of data. Their findings back previous studies that have linked trademarks associated with genius – such as attention to detail, breathtaking achievement and obsession with specific subjects – to autistic conditions.