Is it discriminatory to only hire extroverts?

The Boy & The Bear - Redondo Beach, CA <3

As my fellow, nondescript liberal arts majors can attest, it is no rare occurrence to get to the end of a promising job opening only to find the (literal) bottom line you’ve experienced your whole life:

• Candidate MUST be Extroverted

Or some other iteration of this sentiment, almost all of which, do capitalize the word as if to say that “Extroverted” is a type of person, a nationality of sorts.

I know what you’re thinking. If you’re introverted, then the job’s just not for you. It’s a good thing that you caught the caveat before you applied. You wouldn’t have liked this work anyway. At least, this is what I’ve argued with myself over and over again.

Let me put it this way, though. Have you ever seen a job opening demanding that a candidate MUST be Introverted?

I haven’t.

Before we call discrimination on it, though, it might do us some good to investigate how exactly extroversion or introversion works within us. Are we chained throughout life to only one or the other? Are they comparable to other perceived binaries like sex and race? A socially-informed answer, of course, would be no. Absolutely not. No one needs to wear extroversion or introversion the same way someone has to wear sex and race every day for the calculating eyes of our rigged ideology.

But, there does seem to be a bit of an inherent-ness about it. As if extroversion or introversion is something we’re already carrying inside of us at birth, something that occurred during the early stages of cell division bringing half of us into the world already advantaged for the workforce. Or perhaps it’s developed later, during those vital identity-building phases of early infancy no one remembers when they’re older. Maybe our parents are a part of it. Maybe they aren’t. Check out Lacan’s “mirror stage” if you’re up for a real mind-fucking examination of Self development.

At any rate, it seems that by the time the average human reaches adolescence, extroversion or introversion is rooted inside of us like a beating organ, one that we can’t swap for another without a whole lot of pain and identity crisis.

So is it wrong for employers to weed out employee hopefuls by hiring just one of the above?

Maybe. But what if the core of the complication stems down to an error in language? What if what employers mean to say in their job postings is that they are looking for a candidate who is “outgoing,” not necessarily “extroverted?” In other words, someone who is gregarious and charismatic, but doesn’t necessarily rely on social interactions to derive energy.

Is this any better, though? Are "shy" and "outgoing," for instance, traits that are as seemingly un-swappable as "introverted" and "extroverted?"

Many, I think, would say no. These traits can be exchanged. A shy person, for example, can, and should, become outgoing. It just takes practice.

I am of the unpopular opinion that it is a little more complicated than this, however.

As someone who has lived the tragic “shy/introvert” personality combo, I can tell you that for me shyness is only marginally more malleable than introversion. In my experience, it is something you hack at not having constantly and when you haven’t been hacking it climbs back over you like leprosy. My whole life has been one long uphill climb to not be shy. It has been ingrained in my being from day one that it is my least desirable trait. But, has knowing this made it any easier for me to change? Not in the slightest. If anything, the pressure to be what I naturally am not only seems to make the conversion stick less.

What’s frustrating, in a way, is that a naturally outgoing person will never personally understand this struggle. They will never encounter a situation in which they are told they must not be outgoing in order to succeed, just as an extroverted person will likely never be told to not be extroverted to succeed. They will never need or be expected to change the roots of who they are because their roots are the model around which this society revolves.

Are we all just meant to be outgoing extroverts then?

I'd say diversity and depth in art and culture is enough argument to dispute this dystopia. There's also the thought that introversion and extroversion don't even exist as a binary in the first place, that we all land somewhere on a spectrum between the two, leaving the range of "acceptable" extroversion or introversion totally in the eye of the beholder; as is the case for any "perceived-as-binary-but-actually-a-spectrum" traits (and honestly joke's on you if you think anything is an absolute binary - we're all some version of ambivert in the end).

Before we drown in the deep end of endless philosophical questioning, though, I'll circle back to this: must a candidate only be extroverted or outgoing in order to perform a socially interactive job well?

In my opinion, no. A shy introvert can absolutely achieve success in that position. Their presumed lack of social assertiveness is really a method for human insight. Their quietness allows them to listen, their reservations allow them time to see the details. In their proclivity for observing and analyzing the world around them, introverts are able to unearth depths of empathetic meaning a lot of extroverts can’t reach.

So my advice for the shy introverts out there shooting for that "extroverts-only" role: if you're passionate for the work, go for it. Rewrite the qualifications list for them. Because shyness and introversion qualify you as a strong candidate, too. And you can prove it to them.