I'm being totally literal. Prioritize empathy for others as a quality you look for in candidates/colleagues. It's not all that hard to spot and interview for, and I think it's crazy valuable in teams. Particularly (this is relevant to my work) when you're not your own user (because you build for a market of users that you aren't.. like tools for doctors or journalists, or I dunno).
This article[1] has some good things to say around this.
> It's not all that hard to spot and interview for
I'd argue that it's a lot harder than you think - you might be able to spot what you recognize as empathy, which is likely specific to a particular culture or personality type. Even at that, under the pressure and power imbalance of an interview, your hypothetical empathetic person might be trying their best to appear calm and focus on responding intelligently.
For instance: I'm on the autism spectrum. In an interview, my empathy might be masked by a general nervousness around newly met people, or by unintentional gaffes of body language. I could very easily see myself showing up as a false negative on your empathy test in an interview.
Another case: a highly qualified candidate from a high-context culture, who might be inclined to demonstrate deference or politeness as a form of building accord with their interviewer. If you're looking for a more effusive, gregarious "personableness", this might too show up as a false negative.
Me too. I find nervousness is generally a positive indicator for empathy.
> If you're looking for a more effusive, gregarious "personableness"
I'm generally not. In general I look less at how someone interviews and more at choices they've made. How people behave in an hour isn't as interesting to me as how they've behaved over the past years.
> Prioritize empathy for others as a quality you look for in candidates/colleagues.
My experience has been that most people are very empathetic to "their people" and much less empathetic to everyone else, so I suspect you'd end up with the same people you'd get if you took the "hire more people like us" default.
That's definitely a danger, and it's not an either-or thing, of course, as well.
I think the point of that advice is to remind that for an astounding amount of people empathy is not at all a priority! It may be even seen as a weakness, in an unspoken way. Humanity and empathy should be a core value on a company's banner precisely because it's fairly explicitly discouraged by default in personal and work culture at large.
>I think the point of that advice is to remind that for an astounding amount of people empathy is not at all a priority!
I certainly agree with that; I personally put effort into appearing less empathetic and less respectful than I normally am when I'm trying to get a job, just because I am more likely to get the job when I do that; my theory is that it matches most people's heuristics for "confidence"
(I mean, there is a cost... I'd prefer to work at a place that didn't value "confidence" - but not as strongly as I prefer to work.)
But yeah. I'm pretty sure people who are interviewing have no real interest in empathy or diversity. Hell, listen to just about anyone talk about "cultural fit" - everyone has an idea of what their new employee should look like, and there's not a lot of diversity (either in the 'inclusive of protected classes' sense or the "diversity of thought" sense) in that idea.
There are super good points here. WAY too much value is put on "confidence". I imagine because really talented folks are tend to be confident confidence is preferred because talent is harder to gauge. That's a shame.
"Culture Fit" is a really problematic state of mind. I totally agree that it locks in on a 'type' and reduces diversity. It's a dangerous, ego-maniacal, and lazy way to hire.
