Kevin Blair, Mike Hulse and Ben Usher have formed tech firm Neurovirse

Three North West entrepreneurs have joined forces in a startup that aims to make it easier for neurodiverse people to find jobs with the world’s biggest businesses.

Kevin Blair, Mike Hulse and Ben Usher have formed tech firm Neurovirse to develop an AI-powered recruitment platform with the mission statement “from stigma to superpower”.

They say most job platforms and big company recruitment programmes aren’t suited to neurodiverse people, which means companies and recruiters are missing out on a potentially big pool of talent.

They launched the platform to mark Neurodiversity Celebration Week – and say they want the business to grow to serve as many as a million candidates worldwide.

The founders have already enjoyed successful careers in the recruitment and tech sectors. Mike and Kevin have worked in senior roles for companies including Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, Ricoh and Ericsson.

Ben, originally from Wirral, is a former child and teenage actor who appeared in adverts for Nerf guns during X Factor advert breaks. He moved into recruitment and has worked in senior recruitment roles for organisations including the University of Manchester, Manchester United and The Very Group.

Neurovirse will focus on helping connect candidates with “enterprise” companies – the global giants that each employ hundreds or thousands of people.

Ben said: “Our mission is ‘from stigma to superpower’ – so it’s to give these candidates access to jobs in these kind of enterprise environments.”

He added: “We want to help a million candidates plus, globally, and we want to give them access to enterprise job opportunities with some of the largest companies in the world.”

Neurodiversity is a term that can encompass neurological differences including autism, ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia. Neurodiversity Celebration Week aims to ensure “neurological differences are recognised and respected as all other human variations”. The NCW website says: “Many challenges neurodivergent people face are more to do with the environment and systems they are placed in, often designed by a majority population.”

Explaining the challenges in recruitment, Ben said: “The way the recruitment process is set up in a lot of enterprise companies at the moment is, we believe, set up for neurotypical candidates. So when candidates are applying for jobs with some of the largest companies in the world, there’s a number of stages that they have to go through that we believe aren’t set up for neurodivergent people.

“Typically there will be five or six stage processes to these things where they’re expected to go to a 20 or 30-person assessment center in a room, then expected to go to a five or a six person panel interview and they’re given a task to take home.”

Instead, Neurovirse allows candidates to log on to the platform and take an assessment to come up with a “success profile. Neurovirse will then use AI to match those profiles with companies looking to recruit for particular roles, bypassing traditional recruitment steps.

Ben said the reaction from candidates so far to the platform had been “really positive”. The business was founded a year ago and is now fundraising so it can launch globally.

As well as appearing in those Nerf adverts, the young Ben also appeared in some episodes of Hollyoaks, Grange Hill and Waterloo Road.

He smiled: “I’ve been acting from five or six years old. I’ve had an agent from 13 years old, been on both stage and screen. I was the face of Nerf on ITV1 and ITV2 in the advert break of X Factor… you’ll probably see me on all the boxes and all the adverts.”