Empathy As A Starting Point To Attract The Best Talent

As a recruiter, I see lots of things every day where companies or candidates shoot themselves in the foot… do things that hurt their efforts.

This is the first article in what I hope will be a series that will touch on various aspects of the recruiting process and what you can do to improve your results, both within each step and overall.

For this first one, I want to start with what I believe is the one overarching idea behind every other bit of advice I could give to companies or candidates. The one umbrella idea under which all the rest fall.

And that umbrella topic is empathy.?

More specifically, the ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and see the same situation from their point of view instead of your own. This ability will lead to an improved hiring process, happier candidates, better & longer-term hires, and a noticeable effect on the P&L.

If you’re in the C-suite, I bet that last one got your attention. You might also think I'm BS'ing you but I promise I am not.

Let me ask this question: When a candidate is interviewing for a job at your company, whose priorities is the candidate looking out for first?

Answer: They are looking out for their priorities first. That's why it's critical for you to understand what's most important to them. If you have that info, then you are much more likely to find common ground and your next great hire.

So why don’t people already do this? Well, if it were easy everyone would do it, like peeing in the shower.

When your whole day is meetings and an interview gets thrown into your one free hour, or when your project deadlines are coming up fast BUT now you need to plow through resumes to decide whom to interview AND you know this hire is critical to the team BUT there just isn’t time BECAUSE every other fire is just as important to put out...

Look, everyone has a giant pile of work on top of them, hiring managers?and?candidates, and that keeps you in your head all the time. It’s extremely hard to stop at that moment, take a breath, and focus your mind on someone else’s point of view.

We’re all swamped with our own junk all day, every day. Learning to place it to the side for a moment is a real skill that takes practice.

So, why should you bother learning this new skill? What are some benefits of thinking about things from the other person’s POV? Here are a few examples:

1. Writing your resume in anticipation of and answering the concerns of the hiring manager for a role.
2. Job descriptions that actually answer the question of “What’s in it for a candidate to come work for us?” instead of only being about what the company needs (at best) or being a complete cut-and-paste of the same job description used for the last 20 years (at worst).
3. An interview process that makes it look like a company actually has its stuff together and can execute (even if it’s just for that one moment in time).
4. Higher job offer acceptance rates and fewer 11th-hour surprises because what’s important to the candidate has been identified early and is contained & explained in the offer package.
5. An onboarding process that makes a new hire feel valued and welcome; reinforces their belief that they made the correct choice instead of planting the seed of doubt.

Putting yourself in another person’s shoes to see their POV comes from an old sale technique that answers questions or objections before they get asked, preventing them from becoming problems later.

Now I know what some of you BIG BOSSES are thinking, “We’ve got a business to run. My employees are here to do what I need them to get done. We don’t have time for this huggy, huggy, kissy, kissy stuff!”

Three things to unpack here.

First, don’t mix up empathy with sympathy.?EMPATHY?means you?understand?someone else’s view.?SYMPATHY?means you?understand and agree with?someone else’s views.?

It’s an important distinction.?Would you ever go into a high-stakes negotiation without understanding what the other side wants and why they want it? Of course not! That’s critical info to have for a successful outcome.

Interviews are negotiations, too (i.e. two-sided with both parties trying to measure the other and get what they want).

Second, I'm?not?suggesting you shortchange evaluating talent against your needs (although I do think being more flexible is to your benefit - more on that in another post). I?am?suggesting a change to your mindset, both at the beginning of the search and during interviews, to attract more candidates and get better outcomes. Absolutely interview people against your requirements - just be prepared to allow them to interview you against theirs as well.

Third, you probably (hopefully) strive for continuous improvement in other aspects of your business, like Manufacturing, R&D, Supply Chain, etc. So why should Talent Acquisition be any different? Continuous improvement should be ingrained in every department of the company, not just those that touch your product or service directly. In fact, I’d argue that Talent Acquisition influences your SUCCESS more than any other process in your business.

In future blogs, we’ll take deeper dives into specific topics from the start of the recruiting process to the end. We’ll talk about subjects & tell war stories about companies looking to hire, candidates looking to get hired, and recruiters themselves and how we can do better.