Empathy is NOT the Same as Sympathy

Last week I shared some, let's say, controversial thoughts about AI and its use in the hiring and interview process.

Now, for some context, I used to be a recruiter. I've done both corporate and agency recruiting. I've seen, firsthand, what it's like from the other side of the interviewing table. Like everyone else who currently has a job, I have been on the job-seeking/interviewing side as well.

You don't have to go far on LinkedIn to see someone bitching about the interviewing process. How it made them feel, usually not good (small, insignificant, impersonal, and on and on).

The application process is usually shit because the underlying technology hasn't changed in over a decade and is shit itself. Most recruiters, I'm willing to bet, have never gone through their own company's application process or forget what it was like when they did it themselves, or they have a low bar and expectation for what a good experience should be.

Ok. I've gotten the obvious context out of the way.

Let's talk about what I said and the reaction, mostly from recruiters, that occurred.

I said one way to add empathy into the interview process was to replace the first part of the interview process - resume reviews, phone screens with recruiters, and follow-up - with AI, automation, and clarifying intake questions.

That may sound contradictory, and that's how many people took it.

Because they're confusing sympathy with empathy.

When you talk with a candidate and they're telling you about why they want to change jobs or why they no longer work at a company, or why they need a specific salary, you think being sympathetic helps. You may not be able to relate, so you don't try. This is not empathy.

Empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes and feeling what they're feeling and experiencing what they're experiencing - from their worldview or point of view, not through the filter of your own (sympathy).

Empathy is hard to do because you will never truly know what it's like to be someone else. However, you can try to get as close as you can. That's how Seth Godin has described empathy related to marketing, and I believe that's how it relates to everything.

Empathy isn't something that you engage in a moment while you're talking to someone. You use empathy in design. Design of an interview process and workflow. Design in the application process. Design in what happens after a candidate speaks with you.

I would say that ghosting a candidate when you no longer want to move forward with them is NOT empathetic. It's protecting your feelings. The way it makes YOU feel to deliver bad news. Ignoring what it feels like to be dismissed after vulnerably taking time off from the job you do have, which also involves risk. The candidate has potentially risked being fired to meet with you, and you don't even have the guts to, at the very least, send them an email to let them know you won't be moving forward? Is that empathetic? Hardly.

Maybe sending an automated email triggered by a 'decline' action in your ATS isn't the most personal thing, but at least it lets the candidate know where they stand and how to move forward. If you're a smaller company where your recruiters aren't expected to have 50+ phone calls and send out 100+ cold emails per week, there's no excuse for not sending a 1:1 personal email to the candidate that you're turning down.

Sure, bias can be designed into AI, and maybe AI isn't the ultimate answer, but empathy needs to be considered at ALL phases and touchpoints of the interview process.

Something needs to be done to allow dots to be connected with not only someone's job history but also their experience beyond what's on their resume. Their core strengths that maybe their past jobs didn't allow them to put forward.

I'm saying that the way recruiting is done today is archaic, un-empathetic at every step of the process, and needs to be changed.

Weirdly, removing the human from the front end of the process may help connect the dots of someone's true abilities. It's hard to think critically about someone's whole experience when a recruiter has to worry about reading, err skimming, as many resumes as possible so they can reach the needed numerical output necessary to get the odds to swing in their favor of keeping their job.

Humans should be involved in the empathetic design and the critical analysis that needs to occur to see someone's true potential.

Let's admit, many people somehow get stuck in jobs early in their career that are not a match for their true strengths and abilities, and then they're stuck for years, if not their entire career, mainly because they're being judged by a resume and the last job they had.

And then they're ghosted during the most vulnerable times of their career.

Let's take the human sympathy out of the process and replace it with empathy at every point. That, to me, is more human than having a human blandly read through a list of questions they have for a candidate during a 30-minute phone screen, treating each person's experience the same.