What Tinder Can Tell Us About Job Hunting – Part 4: She’s Just Not That Into You
There are more similarities between Tinder and the job hunting process than you might think. Here’s how to deal with rejection from both potential partners and dates.
Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 in this series.
It all started so well. You went into it with high hopes, and it seemed like a match made in heaven. You’d told your friends, you’d even told your mum and of course she’d told her friends. But then…nothing. They never call, they never write. Those potential employers can be every bit as heart-breaking as the “ideal” match that you thought you’d made through Tinder.
Coping with rejection is an inevitable part of the job hunting process and because it can feel both painful and humiliating you need to remember to deal with it properly.
Rejection can happen at any stage of the Tinder or job hunting processes. Although it’s tempting to try to spare your own feelings by quickly saying “plenty more fish in the sea” and moving swiftly on, it’s a much better idea to sneak a peek through your fingers and try to work out what went wrong.
Saying the Right Things
If your Tinder profile is fundamentally pictures of you with your friends, you may think “I look sociable, that’s great” but your prospective dates may be thinking “who am I supposed to be looking at?” Similarly with CVs, a lot of people talk about the projects that they’ve worked on, and what the team did, without saying what they personally achieved. It’s important to stand out so that people can see you. Otherwise you may simply get a Swipe Left – CV in the bin.
If you’re getting a lot of rejections without meeting anyone, go back and see if what you’re saying about yourself is really selling you as well as it could be.
On the other hand it may be that you’ve not quite tried hard enough. Maybe some of your Tinder photos are blurry, or taken from a bad angle, or in harsh lighting. Similarly, your CV may be littered with spelling mistakes, or grammatical errors or written in an ugly font (Times New Roman for CVs? No!). So, do the painful thing and try to find what you’re doing wrong.
One advantage that job-hunters have over Tinder-users is that if they don’t hear back they can always try again. If you’ve applied for a job but not heard back, then why don’t you look again at the job spec, reconfirm that your CV really is a good match and that it’s well-presented, and then ask the potential employer for their comments.
Your CV may have been lost amid a mass of applications, and if you show the initiative and enthusiasm to follow up then you are much more likely to at least get a response.
Be on the Level
Now let’s say your prospective date/employer likes what they see and invites you to chat over a coffee. You’ve told them that you’re a highly-skilled tennis coach/brain surgeon/fighter-pilot but when they meet you they discover that, well, you’re just not.
No-one likes to feel misled and a potential employer is going to be every bit as disappointed as a potential date to find out that you’ve lied to them. The subsequent rejection is your fault, not theirs. In future, you need to focus on being the great person that you are, and not trying to pretend to be someone else.
Let’s assume you’ve got to that meeting and it seems like everything went swimmingly. The body language was there, the personal chemistry was right. It feels like you’re both exactly what the other person was looking for. But then the communication stops – no more friendly messages, no more wooing. It seems that you’ve been dropped like a hot potato.
It could be that the other person hasn’t made up their mind yet, or needs to meet other people first, so if you’ve not heard anything for perhaps a week it is entirely fair for you to make contact. No news is not always bad news. You don’t want to seem like a stalker of course, but you do want to express your interest.
Don’t be Disheartened
And this is a good point to remind you that when you are the one holding the balance of power, as a potential employer or a potential date, the right way to deal with people is to be nice. If you’re going to reject someone, be polite, be clear, and don’t waste their time. Karma will reward you.
Sometimes you’re going to do everything right and it’s still not going to work. Unfortunately that’s just life. You can be the perfect person in every way but it may turn out that your prospective date simply clicks that little bit better with someone else.
It’s the same when you’re job hunting. You may completely fit the bill but if a prospective employer meets someone who brings an additional skill which the employer hadn’t even thought that they needed…well, there’s nothing you can do about that.
Sometimes when they say, “it’s not you, it’s me”, that’s true – you couldn’t have done anything differently. So when that happens, brush yourself down, remind yourself that you’re fabulous, and get back out there.
Good luck!
