Resumes are Tinder Profiles for Hiring
What Dating Markets Tell Us About Job Markets
Dating markets and job markets are very similar. Much has been written about the dynamics of Tinder: Everyone is focused only on the most superficial, the pictures. Attractive people get way too many people swiping right, and less attractive people get too few. This results in a tendency for everyone to converge on the type of flattering pictures that will increase their swipe right traffic. This increases the number of ‘matches’, but not the number of successful dates if your goal is to find a relationship.
Unfortunately, a similar dynamic prevails in job search and hiring because the primary form of information exchange is a resume. Resumes are like Tinder profiles. Employers swipe right if you went to Harvard, worked at Google, have a CS degree. But what if you went to a state university, worked at a small no-brand company, and don’t have a specialized skillset? When you are a job seeker it can feel like every job posting looks like this:
We’ve talked about why job postings look like this in a previous article. There is a tendency to describe the ‘perfect’ candidate. Everyone has an idea of must-have criteria for hiring, and usually they all end up in the job description, which in turn describes an individual that doesn’t exist. In fact, job descriptions usually end up describing what a company wants a person to be 1–2 years into the job.
So what do job candidates do when they are faced with a wall of such descriptions? If your resume doesn’t look that great compared to someone with a Harvard degree and superpowers, you have several options:
Don’t apply — company definitely misses out on great talent.
Apply with your resume as is — company is likely to miss out on your talent if you don’t have any signals, e.g. Google experience, that they value.
Apply with your resume a little spruced up — so you didn’t outright lie but you exaggerated. You are more likely to get an interview, but not necessarily the job, so you’ve wasted both your time and the company’s.
Apply with a resume that is fabricated — you are catfishing in the job market, and you are definitely wasting your time and the company’s. This will backfire.
It’s possible to find love on Tinder, but not probable. You’ll probably end up with a lot of dates. It’s possible to find a great career with your resume (whether it’s truthful or not), but not probable. You’ll likely end up going on a lot of interviews, maybe even take some jobs. But you’ll be getting lucky if you find a great fit with a job and a company that works for you.
Changing the Rules of the Game
We aren’t arguing that companies should stop looking at resumes entirely. Nor do we think that job seekers should resign themselves to making a Faustian bargain in trying to get the attention of companies.
We believe it is up to companies to change their behavior to create better outcomes for themselves and for job seekers. Looking at this problem from the company perspective, making decisions about who to interview based on resume data is guaranteeing market congestion (too much interest) for certain candidates, and market failure (too little interest) for others. Most importantly every company has this same data — so on average every other company is behaving exactly like yours.
But you don’t want to do an average job at hiring, you want to outperform the market. To outperform and generate hiring ‘alpha’ you need better information than your peers. Where can you get this information?
It starts from within your company. Every company has a unique culture and value proposition for job seekers. Your company will be the best place for some subset of job seekers to work, and your challenge is broadcast your culture so you start attracting the right candidates (and deterring the wrong ones).
The next step is to gather this type of information from candidates. The majority of candidates with perfect resumes for the position you are hiring for are not going to be a good fit for your company culture. Your recruiting team, hiring managers, and interviewers are all wasting valuable time and energy focusing on these candidates while ignoring others. By gathering data about job seekers core values and evaluating how they align with your own, you avoid this costly hiring expense.
Most importantly, you are able to identify candidates that other companies may be ignoring. This is where you start to generate hiring alpha. Outperform your peers by identifying candidates that are in less demand, not because they have less potential, but because job markets aren’t fair the same way dating markets aren’t fair. We haven’t figured out a solution to dating markets yet, but culture management and hiring tools like Pomello can help companies identify great candidates with lower search costs.
