The one skill you are born with, that we won’t hire without

Empathy. Throughout my 28 years of life I have realized one thing; people either have it or they don’t. You can fake it but cannot learn it.

I like to think of it as the ability to put yourself into someone elses shoes. I have empathy. I find myself being forced to empathize in every situation. I can suppress, even ignore it but cannot turn it off.

Whenever I end up calling Comcast I know I’m going to let the person on the other end have it. Why the fuck is my internet down again? I envision screaming, swearing and doing anything to express my displeasure with their service. Before doing so I’m forced to put myself in the persons shoes on the other line and I immediately realize it’s not their fault. I empathize with their situation and always end up being nice and trying to help them work through my problem. This fucking sucks. Why couldn’t I just let them have it?

There are certain roles in a tech company that require a high level of empathy; customer success, engineering, management. Imagine an engineer that actually put themselves in their users position at every step of the development process. Imagine a customer support person who could actually feel the users’ pain on the other side of the call. These are the people we want and we won’t sacrifice.

I’m the CEO of shyp.com and we are hiring. If you are an empathetic person check out our positions @ https://angel.co/shyp/jobs

You can follow my ramblings @ twitter.com/kevingibbon