There’s a phrase I keep coming back to whenever I think about what we do at Zenex, and it’s this idea of hiring with heart. I’ve been in staffing for over twenty years now and I’ve watched the industry evolve in a hundred different ways, but the thing that’s always mattered most to me hasn’t changed at all. It’s how we treat people through the process.
Hiring is one of the most human things a company does. When a hiring manager picks up the phone and says we need someone, what they’re really saying is, there’s a gap on our team and it’s affecting people. Maybe it’s affecting workloads. Maybe it’s affecting morale. Maybe there’s a patient care team running thin or an IT department trying to deliver on a deadline without enough hands. Whatever the specifics, there are always real people on the other end of it. And I think the moment we lose sight of that, we stop doing the work well.
What I mean by heart
I don’t mean being soft. I don’t mean ignoring timelines or letting things slide because we’re busy being warm. Hiring with heart is actually quite rigorous. It means paying close enough attention to understand what someone really needs, not just what’s written on the job description. It means asking the kind of questions that go a little deeper than the standard intake call. It means listening, and I mean truly listening, not just waiting for the information you need so you can move on to the next step.
I’ve always believed that the quality of a placement starts with the quality of the conversation that came before it. If you rush that part, if you skip over the context and go straight to matching keywords on a resume to keywords on a brief, you might fill the role. But you probably won’t change the team. And changing the team for the better, that’s what a great hire actually does.
Why I think it matters now more than ever
We’re living in a time where so much of our communication has been compressed. Emails, texts, quick messages, AI-generated responses. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that. But I do think it’s created a kind of hunger in people for something more real. When someone takes the time to actually understand your situation, to remember what you told them, to follow up not because there’s a business reason but because they were thinking about how things turned out, it stands out in a way it maybe didn’t ten or fifteen years ago.
I read something a while back from Paul Zak, a researcher at Claremont Graduate University, who spent years studying what happens in the brain when people feel genuinely cared for. His work, published in Harvard Business Review, found that those experiences trigger the release of oxytocin, the chemical most closely linked to trust and collaboration. He identified the intentional building of relationships as one of eight core factors that create trust in any organization.
That resonated with me deeply. Because trust is everything in our work. A hiring manager who trusts you will tell you things that completely change how you approach a search. A candidate who trusts you will be honest about what they’re looking for instead of just telling you what they think you want to hear. And that honesty on both sides is what leads to placements that actually work, not just on paper but in the room, on the floor, in the daily rhythm of a team.
What it looks like in practice
Hiring with heart doesn’t require a personality overhaul or some dramatic shift in how you operate. A lot of it comes down to small, consistent things.
It’s remembering that a hiring manager mentioned their team was burned out, and letting that shape who you recommend. It’s checking in after a placement to ask how things are going, not because you need a testimonial but because you want to know. It’s noticing when someone seems hesitant on a call and giving them the space to say what’s really on their mind instead of pushing through the agenda.
It’s also about how you treat candidates. Every person who comes through our door is somebody’s whole life. Their career, their livelihood, their sense of purpose. That’s not something I take lightly and I never want anyone on my team to take it lightly either. Whether we place someone or not, I want them to walk away feeling like they were treated with dignity and respect. That matters to me as much as any business outcome.
What I’ve seen it build
Over twenty years, I’ve watched what happens when you do this consistently. Relationships deepen. People come back. They tell other people about you. They pick up the phone and call you first, not because you’re the biggest or the flashiest, but because they remember how it felt to work with you.
Something I’m really proud of is that more than 90% of our business at Zenex comes from referrals. That didn’t happen by accident. It comes from thousands of conversations where someone felt like they were heard. Where the person on the other end of the call actually cared about getting it right for them.
I don’t think there’s any shortcut to that. And I don’t think there’s any technology that can replace it. The tools will keep getting better and faster and we should absolutely use them. But the heart of this work will always be human. It will always come down to one person paying attention to another person and caring enough to get it right.
That’s what hiring with heart means to me. And it’s the reason I still love doing this after all these years.
Citation:
Zak, P. J. (2017). “The Neuroscience of Trust.” Harvard Business Review, January-February 2017. https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust
Written By
Neha Verma
Neha Verma is the Founder and CEO of Zenex Partners. She writes about leadership, the staffing industry, and the human-centered approach that's guided Zenex since the beginning.
