The double empathy opportunity
No problem, pt 8
“Imagine you’ve had a hard day driving to clients. Your car broke down. Your phone isn’t working. You’re knackered from lack of sleep. And you come home to your wife, asleep on the sofa, with a plate of chocolate cake and a glass of red wine next to her.
How do you react?”
That was the scenario given to us by our ante-natal instructor after she’d separated us from our other halves. Babies due three months later.
We were given 5 minutes to discuss, followed by a group debrief.
“It’s a trap!” I ackbared to my peers.
I’d sussed out that she would be giving the mums the opposite scenario, which turned out to be the classic, old-fashioned, example of new mum baby chaos, utter fatigue, and an angry husband swanning in after a fun day with the adults.
But we played the game and acknowledged that our likely reactions would be one of mutual frustration, tiredness and anger at our other halves.
When in reality, we should be on the same team, with empathy for the other’s experiences.
Of course, the baby will be the same for us both, but our experiences of it differ.
Dad experience and Mum experience.
With the added fun of Friend experience, months later, unable to comprehend how we could declare our love of being parents, while complaining about every moment of being parents.
Experience that would later evolve into their own parenthood, and the apology of ‘now we know exactly what you’re talking about.’
Their disbelief of my excuses turned into insight into their own challenges, from exactly the same words.
It’s funny isn’t it, that the only thing we actually know of the world is our experience of it.
Everything else we take on faith.
So to understand the experiences of others it’s helpful to categorise.
Candidate experience
Employee experience
Employer experience
They aren’t nice to have, they’re the categorisation of how they live the vacancy.
I expect this is why ‘lived experience’ has been a popular term in recent years, although it was coined by Simone De Beauvoir in her treatise on second-wave feminism in 1969.
It’s a category definition to show that unless you’ve lived in their shoes, you can’t understand their position.
I don’t use the phrase ‘lived experience’ personally, and I think it can be used in a way that makes it impossible to argue against a strong opinion, but as a category of experience, it’s valuable.
Especially in the wonky world of out-of-date ‘facts’ used to tackle modern problems.
With every problem comes the opportunity to find a solution.
If the vacancy is the baby, and the candidate and employer are the parents - how can we look at the experiences of one to improve the experiences of the other?
For me, it comes back to my Ackbar moment. While the NCT teacher was talking about one thing, the meaning I took from it was the other.
How can I understand mum’s experience, and improve my behaviours and attitudes, in service of child wrangling?
With the added benefit of lower risk of a grumpy mum?
How can we understand candidate experience, and improve our behaviours and attitudes, in service of the vacancy?
With lower risk of an unfulfilled employer?
It’s true and fair to say that most people in a recruitment process work to their own needs.
At the same time, many people complain about recruitment.
Whether it’s a lack of candidates, ghosting, recruiter behaviour, employers changing their minds on whim, or anything else.
These are complaints you’ll hear from candidates, employers and recruiters - hop on LinkedIn for five minutes and tell me I’m wrong.
But in all of these complaints, there’s little recognition for the why of it.
In shocking news, recruiters aren’t evil people - it’s the system that precipitates the behaviours.
In even more shocking news, recruitment isn’t broken. It does what it says on the tin, in service of its users’ needs.
It’s just that it’s the wrong users.
And because it’s the wrong users, the right users suffer, and the intended users may experience poor outcomes.
An ATS should be designed for the candidate, not the employer, to maximise the employer’s experience.
Try out your own ATS, in the shoes of the candidate. How shite is it?
An advert should be designed for the candidate, not the employer, for exactly the same reasons.
Adverts are effective if you point them in the right direction.
Double empathy exists in recruitment, in a tri-fold way.
Candidate-recruiter
Candidate-employer
Employer-recruiter
And if you can’t communicate in a way that caters to the individual needs of the other party, that communication error only becomes worse when you involve a third.
This is why the principles of an outside-in approach to recruitment can be effective, particularly for problem vacancies and key hires.
When vacancies matter most, why wouldn’t you put your best foot forward to try and fill them?
Working outside-in, with empathy for the experiences candidates have had that may inform their decisions.
With empathy for the experience they will have of your hiring process.
With empathy for the experience that will most likely lead to them accepting an offer.
And with empathy that what you experience of them isn’t the full story.
That’s the opportunity of recognising double empathy for what it is brings.
Which for me is filling difficult vacancies more straightforwardly.
Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Greg
P.s. I should be available for further projects from the end of this week. Get in touch if you’ve a recruitment problem that needs attention.