The Double Empathy problem - No problem pt 3

Greg Wyatt • May 7, 2026

I realised I had observed Double Empathy problem in recruitment as early as 2006.

It was at the time a candidate was offered a role, and the (fortunately overcome) issue of her start date came up.

She told me she had said to them at interview “I won’t be able to start any sooner than three months notice, due to managing a site closure”.

Somehow they heard “I can start in a month”.

They were both adamant they were right.

We agreed that what Julie meant to say, what she said, and what they heard, were all slightly different.

Perception and intent.

It’s fundamentally true that what an employer and a candidate want from a recruitment process is different, even though the outcome they want is often similar.

How they intersect was defined in a very different arena, yet has application in many walks of life.

Around 2016, I learnt about the Double Empathy problem.

This is a term proposed by Damian Milton to explain that autistic people don’t lack empathy. It’s more that they experience the world and express their emotions differently to non-autistic people.

The theory of the double empathy problem suggests that when people with very different experiences of the world interact with one another, they will struggle to empathise with each other. This is likely to be exacerbated through differences in language use and comprehension.

You may be aware that ND people often mask their personality to fit in with an NT world.

Speaking to an autistic friend about this we speculated that masking is about understanding the rules of engagement in society, unconsciously breaking these down into principles and applying them contextually to a given situation.

Can you imagine how tiring that is?

I didn’t really think of it again until a couple of years later.

Around the time my eldest daughter started secondary school, she went from being a child to someone who wanted to find her own personality and interests, while separating herself from what she felt was the child she used to be.

Of course, this wasn’t something I noticed, so stuck in the trenches was I in parenthood. It was something I read in the marvellous book Untangled by Lisa Damour.

If you have daughters, I strongly recommend it. I also recommend it to people interested in leadership and in recruitment - because of how it's inspired me to look at what I do differently.

In reading various chapters for the umpteenth time, I realised it describes the Double Empathy Problem without using those words.

My experiences and hers were so different that when we spoke we had two completely different conversations, different experiences of the same instance, with different reactions.

Perception and intent.

As my mind often does, it wondered into different rabbit holes of double empathy.

“We had it much tougher in my day” “Music these days is rubbish”

Or indeed anywhere that has an ism, from the direct discrimination to unrecognised bias - for example, when you see photos of 'a diverse team', have you noticed few have grey hair?

I’m sure if you’ve regularly interviewed you’ll have noted that the person who gets the job is often the one who interviewed best, not necessarily the best candidate.

It’s because they’ve learnt the rules of the game and given their audience what they think they need.

This is one reason ‘job search coaching’ is such a simple career to develop.

Once you’ve learnt the rules of the game, you can teach others the same.

And the one skill most job seekers haven’t learnt, when they start a job search, is how to look for work.

However a good job search coach is rare, and many rely instead on the sales of hope and fear.

But of course, there’s another side to this, which is that job seekers who haven’t learnt the rules of the game may encounter worse examples of the double empathy problem than others.

Their candidacy is stuck in their head, with insufficient skill to interpret it with meaning.

Not just at interview, but in their CV, in their requirements, and even in which jobs they think they should be applying for.

This is an opportunity in recruitment when we can see that good candidates are hidden by how they’ve expressed themselves.

This means the onus should be on us to create an experience that enables them to show us how they can fulfil our needs.

This, for me, lies at the heart of what good candidate experience is.

Employers suffer from their own double empathy problem.

Replace what I’ve said about candidates with job descriptions, adverts and every touchpoint in recruitment.

Typically it’s about the employer and their needs, unable to articulate with the meaning ideal candidates need. Inside out.

When the opportunity to solve double empathy lies in starting with the experience candidates need. Outside in.

Double empathy is a neurologically built-in issue that can be harmful for autistic people.

As opposed to how it presents systemically in recruitment.

Another reason why process is the opportunity for improvement, rather than just technology.

I find this a fascinating topic to discuss, and I hope this doesn’t do injustice to people who genuinely suffer from a society built against them.

If you disagree with anything I’ve said, I’d love to hear from you. Perhaps we can both learn something.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,

Greg

p.s. Outside of diving into rabbit holes that might improve how we recruit, I also recruit - drop me a line if you're a UK employer and these articles strike a chord. I can help with key hires, fractional talent acquisition and projects you don't have capacity for.

A standard diagnostic

By Greg Wyatt • October 22, 2026
The other day I read a LinkedIn post about the iron triangle as it relates to recruitment. That you can be fast and good, but it will be expensive. That you can be fast and cheap, and it will be bobbins. Or that you can be cheap and good, but it will take longer than the heat death of the universe. At first glance it’s always made sense, with caveats, though that sense has been ablated with the promise of AI. Something that promises to be quicker, cheaper and better than people can manage. The only thing this triangle lacks is judgement-with-responsibility, something AI-style LLMs are currently incapable of, which is why they can be such problematic technology for recruitment. Though if your priority is speed, saving money, and filling jobs, the lack of judgement in even those algorithms that promise black box bias freedom might not be a problem you’d think much about. And when the top is spinning in an elegant way this might seem a standardisation you can apply everywhere, while you get on with your day job. Sadly the only place a spinning top doesn’t stop is when you were dreaming all along. AI has made me think about why the fundamentals of recruitment are so important, using judgement before we launch our projects. Which is why I like the 5Cs of project management as a way to look at recruitment: complexity, criticality, compliance, culture, compassion. With an adaptation and an additional C to be fit for purpose. It’s a great way to consider what approach to deploy: Complexity: the number of moving parts in a role, supply and demand in the candidate market, resources required to engage and bring forward the right people Criticality: the impact a vacancy has on the organisation. The opportunity a great hire brings. The damage the wrong hire can cause. And everything in between Channels: we go where the candidates are, whether at the end a headhunt, from an advert, from sourcing across LinkedIn Recruiter/equivalent tools, CV Databases, ATS records, other platforms, internal applicants, suppliers, consultants, temps, networking, referrals or even from a little black book, which I suspect will become more relevant again when data becomes noise Compliance: not just employment law, but how technology is used to find, engage and assess candidates in a fair, equitable and inclusive way Context: the full picture of the company – its organisational and local cultures, principles and values, mission, vision, goals, challenges and trajectory. The nuts and bolts, what that means for your candidates, and trying to understand the same in them Compassion: recognition of the impact a vacancy has on the employer and its team, balanced with how everyone can be brought together. And compassion for everyone that interacts with our recruitment, in process or invisibly Yes, I swapped context for culture. Hiring for context necessarily includes culture, and goes much further. And I've added Channels, which should always be established before going to market. I like these because they’re a way to ensure that how you recruit is proportionate and appropriate. They may even highlight you shouldn’t hire at all. But what you shouldn’t do is assume one recruitment process is the same as the next, nor that the investment made in reaching desired outcomes should be. What may seem expensive to you might bring an unexpected return on investment. What seems slow at the outset might bring a starter quicker than hoped – proper planning and all that. What seems good quality might fall apart, when the promises prove inadequate. That’s why it’s so important to diagnose first, before standardising. Greg p.s. You're welcome to try my free Hiring Diagnostic & Plan . It's not based on the 6Cs, which I think require more depth than a free tool can reasonably provide. Instead, it draws on principles from other disciplines: True and Fair from accounting, and Suitable and Sufficient from health and safety. It's free and private. Give it a go, and let me know if you'd like to chat through how the 6Cs might apply to your recruitment and enhance the resul 

Introduction to the hidden jobs market

By Greg Wyatt • October 14, 2026
On Wednesday 21st, I'll be doing a LinkedIn Live on The Hidden Jobs Market, joined by Paul Woodhouse. Paul is a marketing leader who has been looking for work in our challenging market. A previous role was a Hidden Job, and has also hired people himself. We'll be looking at his experiences to give a little substance to what can be a nebulous term. I'll show the steps anyone can take to become available for unadvertised vacancies, and for advertised vacancies that are filled by other means - after all employers consider more than only applications when taking a standard approach to recruitment. As a recruiter I don't advertise around half my vacancies, which might be for reasons of confidentiality, a lack of definition in the brief, a on the QT replacement for someone about to be dismissed, or mass availability of candidates. I'll use LinkedIn Recruiter to look for potential candidates, CV databases that can be more effective for immediate hires, my network for referrals and recommendations. My previous candidate pools for other vacancies - some of whom might have once open a time been applicants. Indeed, that last point shows the absurdity of much job search advice. If you apply for a vacancy on an ATS, you might be rejected, yet still be considered for future vacancies in the same employer. A hidden job hidden by an advertised job, where tailoring your CV with AI might make you less likely to be considered. Join us on Wednesday, or if you aren't free, the recording will be available immediately. Both can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7516049669924225027?viewAsMember=true . The chapter below from A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) shows a simple metaphor for the hidden jobs market, why it's such a silly term, and a better way to think about your own job search. 3 - The hidden jobs market In most of the calls I have with job seekers they will ask me about The Hidden Jobs Market. What is it? Is it real? How can I access it? Before we get into that, we should talk about tomatoes. As you read this next section, imagine a tomato is a job. So, you want to procure some tomatoes. How would you? Your local farm shop. The supermarket. Wednesday’s stalls. Maybe you subscribe to a weekly box of veg. Maybe you grow your own. Maybe you trade for the tomatoes from Tim’s allotment. Maybe you look at people funny when they ask for an intro to Tim because his tomatoes are wonderful. You likely wouldn’t buy some from Amazon - they don’t sell fresh food. Not to me anyway. Though you might buy tomato seeds from Amazon if you grow your own. Maybe even cans of crushed tomato, sauce, puree, or whatever meets your needs. As the channel you use to source tomatoes isn’t the only consideration, so too is the configuration of what you need. While you and others all access tomatoes in different ways, some of which overlap, and some of which are mutually exclusive - none of these channels are hidden. It’s just that you may not know how to access some channels, while others won’t be available to you. Now I want you to read that section again. Instead of being your desired job, you are an employer whose desired tomato is a candidate of choice. While recruitment is the inverse of a job search (more on this later), the analogy is better from the employer perspective because they are on a buyer’s journey where you are the product. Employers want to fill their vacancies through the best means. Some vacancies are easy to fill, others not so, and they will access the channels necessary to find the right people. In many situations, they won’t advertise a vacancy, which might be for reasons of confidentiality or convenience. Some say this is as much as 80%, a flawed figure which comes from a flawed survey, or perhaps it comes from a newspaper article in 1974 before computers were a thing. In my recent small-scale research, it was indicated more than 62% of vacancies are advertised. 53% responded they advertise more than 75% of vacancies. Many of the respondents were headhunters, whose business may be based on not running public adverts. I expect this will have skewed the results lower than the true figure. What employers don’t do is hide vacancies systematically. To access these vacancies, you need to understand the channels through which employers hire and invert these channels to form your strategy. Much like how tomatoes are sold through channels which consumers buy from. Is the hidden jobs market real? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that not all jobs are advertised. Some are confidential, some for reasons as mundane as not wanting to deal with hundreds of advert applicants. No, because it isn’t a term that has inherent meaning. Speak to people who advocate for it, often a career coach, and they’ll tell you it’s anything from personal branding and networking to going direct and being referred in. When vacancies aren’t advertised by employers, they often fill them through sourcing - this is a specialist skill related to finding people where they may be found: LinkedIn, CV databases, corporate databases, GitHub, Facebook, YouTube. These are all channels you can access as part of an appropriate multichannel strategy. Which means if you have the right multichannel strategy (I call this Through-the-Line, which we’ll cover in parts 2 and 3), you access all jobs available to you, including those which are hidden and those which are in witness protection on another continent. Who are the headhunters that specialise in your domain? Who are the people who can refer you to jobs? How can you be more discoverable on LinkedIn and CV databases? How can you gain an understanding of the ways in which your ideal job is recruited, so you can take advantage of those channels? Those are better questions to answer to allow an effective through-the-line, multichannel strategy involving outbound and inbound leads. Despite me being vocal about why Hidden is a flawed notion, two people have thanked me for advice that led to their new roles claiming they’d accessed the hidden jobs market. As I gritted my teeth in hidden rage and congratulated them on their success, they unveiled the truth. What they actually did was map out their real life network of people they’d worked with and got in touch. If the people you know don’t know that you are looking for a role, what reason would they have to tell you about a vacancy? It’s simple marketing - right place (LinkedIn), right person (ex-colleague), right message (looking for work), right time (we’ve a vacancy). Of course, that takes a bit of luck to achieve the right congruence. Odds you increase through volume and follow up. And when you do find those opportunities, they are easier to win because you are a known name, not another unknown CV. There it is, the hidden tomato market.