Leverage Empathy, Candidate Personas for Superior Recruiting

Did you know empathy is a recruitment superpower? Jodi Brandstetter, the founder and lead facilitator of By Design Brainery, dedicated an entire session to it at SHRM 24 in Chicago.

“As a recruiter, if you show empathy through the hiring process, you’re going to build trust and they’re going to value you. When that happens, they want to work for your organization, and they want to stay with your organization,” she said.

Brandstetter emphasized that there important differences between sympathy and empathy, mentioning a video featuring insights from Brene Brown.

Empathy and Prospective Employees

Brandstetter challenged HR pros to recall the feelings of frustration and disappointment that come from being “ghosted” by a top candidate, then to think about what might happen to their employer brand if their organization frequently ghosted applicants, making them feel frustrated and disappointed.

If a candidate reaches out to complain about your application process, but you’re not able to fix it at the present time, that’s an opportunity to practice empathy. She said, “You can tell a candidate that you understand it can be frustrating, ‘but this is our process and if you can get through it we would really appreciate it. I’ll help you through it. You can come to our office to apply if you’re having problems.'”

To approach recruitment through a more empathetic lens, Brandstetter also asked attendees to apply for a job at one of their competitors and take notes on the candidate experience.

“If you’re thinking about adding a chatbot to your careers site, look at another industry that does a really good job with chatbots and see what they do, and write down notes on how you could improve your chatbot experience,” she said.

Critically Evaluate Your Application Process

At one point, Brandstetter gave the audience three minutes to use their phones to apply for a job at their own organization. One attendee admitted that she couldn’t get past the log-in screen on her company’s careers site in the allotted time.

In a separate SHRM 24 presentation by HRUTech.com CEO Tim Sackett, it was pointed out that 68% of candidates abandon applications when faced with unnecessary steps in the application process.

To drive the point home about periodically checking your organization’s application process for friction points, Brandstetter told a story about helping one of her clients build a hiring blueprint. “The first thing I did was apply [for a job]. And the process was OK, but they started asking questions about did [I] have a felony [conviction] and things that you should not be asking at that part of the process,” she said.

Candidate Personas

Another way to leverage empathy in the recruiting process is to create nuanced candidate personas.

Describing them as “semi-fictional” representations of your ideal candidate for an open position, Brandstetter called candidate personas her favorite recruiting tool because they can serve as job description templates, provide ideas for interview questions, and facilitate more effective hiring decisions and better organizational fit.

To get started, review the job descriptions, current employees in the role and past candidates for the role. “You can ask your employees … why did they pick this job or what interested them in this role? What concerns do they have with the industry? What motivates them to stay at your organization? What motivates them to stay in that line of work?” Brandstetter said.

When creating candidate personas consider:

• Background. The experience, skills, education and certification(s) this person will bring to the role. What’s the bare minimum of each that’s needed to succeed in the job?
• Motivators. “What motivates someone [with] this skill set to want to come to your organization? Why would they want to leave a current situation?” she said.

Additional Tips

Other measures that Brandstetter recommended:

• Consider where you’re going to look for candidates and how you’re going to engage them. This helps you target your recruitment channels and refine your talent pipeline.
• Job shadowing the specific team where you’re hiring.
• Share candidate personas with the hiring manager.
• Create multiple personas, if needed. After all, the job could have more than one kind of ideal candidate.
• Evaluating — and possibly changing — your pre-employment assessments, and
• Shadowing your hiring managers to get a feel for their interviewing capabilities.