Inclusive Hiring: Breaking Down Recruitment Barriers With Empathy

Inclusivity is more than just a buzzword in the modern workplace. Humans present a diverse workforce and businesses must strive to create spaces where all individuals are welcome.

Building inclusive work environments relies on hiring practices that center around empathy as a tool. With empathy at the heart of business hiring models, managers can break down historical barriers and look beyond biases and preconceptions, preventing marginalization.

Empathetic hiring helps businesses address their approach and create diverse teams that are effective, creative, and efficient. 

An inclusive hiring model benefits both companies and candidates. Hiring without prejudice gives companies access to a broader pool of talent, it is more than just a question of morality. 

Let’s take a look at why it is important and discuss how to cultivate empathy in the hiring phase!

Why Inclusive Hiring Matters

All businesses have a demographic in mind but within each demographic are diverse perspectives. To tap into the diversity and value of your customers, a diverse workforce is needed.

Once upon a time, inclusive hiring was little more than a quota to fill in the aim to “prove” businesses provided equal opportunities. What began as a way to level the playing field has had proven advantages that have not gone unnoticed.

With a myriad of backgrounds in the workplace, different perspectives are heard – and it is a strategic advantage: 43% of organizations that practice inclusivity see an increase in profits.

So there are benefits to breaking down the barriers and hiring without a bias toward gender, race, age, disability, or socioeconomic background.

Empathy-Driven Inclusion

While most businesses have adopted inclusive policies, many operate disingenuously and are simply looking to meet a quota. To truly embrace inclusivity and reap the benefits it needs, hiring operations need to be sustainable – and intelligent empathy plays a huge role. 

With empathy, those in hiring positions can better understand the challenges faced and the obstacles standing in the way of diverse candidates and seek to transform hiring practices.

Hiring workers needs to be treated as far more than a transactional event. Hiring with empathy builds relationships leading to a strong interconnected workforce, with better communication and smoother operation.

Empathy’s Role in Combating Recruitment Barriers

In the traditional recruitment model, criteria can be very rigid, which puts up barriers for underrepresented groups.

With a better understanding, companies can accommodate the needs of an individual, better break down the barriers they might face entering the workplace, and hire candidates who were born for the role.

The Unconscious Bias Barrier

Whether we like to admit it or not, there are often biases (whether conscious or unconscious), but by focusing on empathy in the hiring process, these biases are quashed and a deeper understanding is cultivated.

Biases can be so deeply ingrained that we don’t realize or recognize them influencing recruitment decisions.

Without empathy, a recruiter can’t fairly assess a candidate’s potential and the company essentially misses out on a potentially valuable team member.

Flexible Criteria

Sometimes capable candidates slip through the net simply because they don’t fit the mold perfectly enough. Your average job post may have rigid criteria presented and typical interviews tend to be guilty of a checklist approach. 

Diverse candidates may not tick all of the boxes but are potentially better suited to the role, despite a non-linear career path or unusual background. 

Talents go beyond physical capabilities, qualifications, and job history, and candidates need to be treated with equal footing regardless if recruiters really want to find the right person for a role, therefore more flexibility is needed.

Virtual Barrier Breaking

Many modern workplaces now operate remotely, which is opening doors and breaking down barriers to candidates who may not find work as accessible as others.

As we embrace these models it is important to put the right technological tools in place to accommodate limitations. 

Empathy and inclusion extend to technological tools such as video interviews for inclusive hiring processes and virtual private networks (VPNs) such as Surfshark for secure remote working and sharing of sensitive information online. 

Transforming Candidate Experiences With Empathy

Empathetic leadership fosters a respectful and transparent work atmosphere, which raises employee morale – and 86% of surveyed employees agree with the sentiment.

Recruiters need to put themselves in the candidate’s shoes to create welcoming, inclusive environments that appeal to diverse talent.

Communication Transparency

The hiring process is daunting for the average candidate, but for those in underrepresented groups, there can be far more anxiety experienced.

Recruiters can help ease the uncertainty with transparent communication, explaining the next steps of the process and responding to any doubts or questions raised. 

Listening with an empathetic ear is what matters most during this time to build trust and encourage these candidates to come forward. 

Stress Reduction

The stress of job hunting can be reduced with an empathetic hiring model; candidates may have personal commitments, such as caregiving or holding down multiple jobs.

If candidates are required to schedule multiple rounds during interview processes, they may be excluded from the running. 

Disability and Neurodiversity Considerations

Neurodiverse and disabled candidates have unique needs and non-traditional interview formats might be required for them to be able to demonstrate their capabilities.

These accommodations mustn’t be viewed as a burden – without empathy, companies might miss out on the opportunity to hire exceptional talent.

How to Cultivate an Empathetic Hiring Team

Cultivating an empathetic hiring team must be intentional. We often view empathy as inherent, but unintentional biases can taint processes if empathy isn’t consciously practiced. 

Below are some ways recruiters and management can ensure empathy remains a priority.

Educate, Train, and Develop

The best way to ensure empathetic hiring is with education. This starts with building awareness and exploring recruitment bias and barriers. 

Strong emotional intelligence is required to develop empathy toward diverse candidates which needs training and workshops to develop inclusive hiring skills.

Embedding Empathy

Empathy behaviors must go beyond hiring and training so that a candidate’s well-being is tended to throughout the recruitment journey.

It is no use hiring empathetically if the company culture doesn’t embrace diversity throughout its practices. 

An empathetic company culture is like an ecosystem that naturally attracts empathetic hiring teams who know how to understand the needs of potential employees. 

Improving Through Feedback Loops

Recruitment empathy can’t be thought of as a one-time initiative – it might start with hiring teams, but it is an ongoing practice that requires reflection and tweaking for improvement. 

The best way to strengthen and perfect an empathetic hiring model is to ask candidates for feedback. This helps to identify any areas where candidates felt inadvertently uncomfortable or excluded.

A More Inclusive Workforce

If utilized intelligently, empathy gives recruitment managers a powerful tool that prevents exclusion and opens up the talent pool tremendously. A larger talent pool means diverse and effective teams.

By incorporating empathy into the hiring process, recruiters see candidates and their skills far more clearly and help bring unique perspectives on board. It requires commitment, but flexibility and empathy can help foster greater connections and forge a strong dynamic team.

Empathetic hiring is a more humane model that sees individuals as much more than numbers and is an effective practice for the modern world. 

When companies empathize during the hiring stages, it shows that they value their workers and ultimately cultivate a work environment where everyone feels valued and supported, which has many benefits to business.

With everything we have outlined, recruiters and management can transform their operations and find the right talent using empathy as a hiring tool that goes far beyond reading a resume!