A New Survey Suggests That Compassion is an Important Factor in Workforce Success
DeJesus Solutions' new survey reveals the potential of compassion to improve the labor market life chances of marginalized communities.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- A newly-released DeJesus Solutions survey asked 633 individuals about their experiences with social capital in the workforce. The results were astounding. According to their responses, social capital is the key to workforce success: 39% of respondents said they landed their first job through a connection – that's someone they know, or someone who knows someone they know. Once employed, that number jumped: 44% of respondents say they got their current job thanks to a connection. That's more than double the percentage of respondents who got their hired through a job board like Linkedin, Indeed, or Monster. At the core of these connections was trust. Out of all the interviewees, 56% agreed that trust was the primary motivator for getting hired through connections – a promising statistic supporting efforts to build up inter-community relationships and social capital.
There's more to that trust than meets the eye; it involves a small leap of faith. When DeJesus Solutions surveyed whether respondents ever received an employment opportunity thanks to someone else's compassion, 44% said they had. That figure jumped to 79% when we asked whether respondents knew someone who'd received a job thanks to compassion – and over three-quarters of the time, respondents said that experience worked out well for both the giver and the receiver.
The problem is, compassion is all too often dismissed as another word for empathy; it's more than that. Compassion isn't just feeling what others are feeling. Compassion is recognizing others' struggles and taking actionable steps to rectify the hardships they face. It's seeing someone underqualified for a position, eager to get a foothold in a new field, and taking a chance on them. It's interviewing someone whose outfit looked a little threadbare, and hiring them over the candidates who came in wearing a tailor-fit, three-piece suit. It's seeing past a criminal record and acknowledging someone's motivation to succeed.
Right now, compassion is hardly a subject discussed in workforce development circles, yet it is a major factor in how people get and keep jobs. Research literature is clear: compassion in the workplace is fundamental. Use this survey data as a starting point to encourage policy makers, funders, and workforce systems to invest larger and with broader resources in the study of social capital. We can push them to research the potential of helping job seekers understand the importance of building compassion and the benefits to employers for showing it.
If you'd like to see a breakdown of our data, download the PDF from https://www.edwarddejesus.com/thinking.
SOURCE DeJesus Solutions
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