What Tinder Can Tell Us About Job Hunting – Part 2: “My mother warned me about people like you”

In the second part of this series, we look at how to make sure a recruiter sees you as the right person for the job.

You can read Part 1 of the series here.

This series of articles was co-authored with Andy Storrar, Digital Marketing Specialist.

The worlds of romance and recruitment have this fundamentally in common: someone is looking for the right person, “The One”, and they know that they may have to kiss a lot of metaphorical frogs before they find that person.

And you, my friend, want to connect with your ideal person or work for your ideal company, so let’s think about the lessons we can learn from Tinder.

In the heady early days of someone’s Tinder usage, all that exploratory frog-kissing is pretty damn fun: everyone looks exciting, glamorous, attractive and intelligent. We love them all! But after a few months, and a number of bad dates, the shine has worn off somewhat.

Make Them Feel Loved

Now let’s imagine that your Tinder user is instead part of the recruitment process. It doesn’t matter whether they’re working for a potential employer or for a recruitment agency, you can be sure of this – they’ve kissed a whole swamp full of frogs and they’ve got a rather nasty taste in their mouth. You are wooing a much more cynical audience, and so you need to take care about how you make your approach.

You want the object of your affections/approaches to feel wanted and appreciated – you wouldn’t start a love letter “Dear Sir/Madam” unless you were writing to a horrifyingly undiscerning audience – so make sure that when you make that first approach you show you’ve made the effort. At the very least you need to know the person’s name (and spell it right!), and as far as possible you should try to understand what they’re looking for.

You might be surprised by how many people, when applying for a job, use a template cover letter without bothering to change any details or to explain why they are an ideal match. To a slightly jaded CV-reviewer this doesn’t seem very different from the “numbers game” person at a disco who doesn’t care about nine offended rebuttals as long as they get a kiss the tenth time.

Why Are You a Good Match?

At the same time, if you’re applying for a job for which you’re not quite right, don’t just fire in your CV without making any effort, like someone trying to hoover up a kiss from the drunken singletons at the end of a party. Take the time to emphasise the areas where you do fit and what makes you a good match: in the end, that job may not be quite right but it may still have an attractive sibling in search of “The One”.

Just as you wouldn’t use clichés in your Tinder profile because that would make you sound unimaginative and stupid, it’s not a good idea to glibly claim on your CV that you have a “unique combination of skills” if two million other people in the country can say the same thing. Another common cliché is to claim that you are “the ideal candidate” – this sounds presumptuous and more than a little conceited. The person reviewing your CV has a strong urge to swipe left.

Of course you want to stand out from the crowd…but in a good way. You won’t achieve this by posting Tinder pictures of yourself with drugged tigers or swilling champagne in a helicopter – these are the people your mother warned you about, although frankly she hardly needed to.

A potential employer also wants to know what is special and individual about you, so make sure to highlight the things that you have achieved: don’t try to boastfully claim the achievements of the whole team but instead flag up the specific difference that you made.

Recruiters read a lot of CVs that just list what happened on a project, without showing the contributions that the individual made, and they tend to think that, no matter how glittering the project may sound, the person probably achieved nothing – fairly or unfairly, the individual behind the CV has just sunk into the swamp. Swipe left.

The “One” Is Out There

Does it sound like your ideal partner will never swipe right on you? Not so. That person (or company) is still out there looking for their ideal match, and they really, really want to find them. In the world of Tinder, we know that Romance never dies (although it does sometimes get very cross indeed and give up for a month or so); in the world of employment, those hiring managers want to get the right match and they are being paid to kiss frogs to do it.

It’s your duty not to make the mistakes that might prevent them from seeing that maybe, just maybe, you’re “The One”.