Is Indeed and others like it, becoming the Tinder of Job Searching?

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I took a call from a recruiter last week, which really got me thinking about job applicants and the job market through which they navigate today. There are many ‘professional interviewers’ out there, and with the combination of the instant gratification mentality we see so much in the world, I’m starting to see and hear it creep into the workplace. In speaking with my peers in the industry, there are many applications and workers, who want everything now. They want the title, they want the benefits, and they want the pay, before they walk through the door.

As a job applicant, I get it. You’re swinging for the best hit you can get, but as an employer this is a hard gamble. It can take employers weeks or months (hopefully not years) to know if that newest addition to the team is capable of doing the job at hand.

As an employer, I also get it. You aren’t sure if this person is a fit for your culture or if they can do the job as good and Susan did. You never had to worry about the orders being processed properly, and maybe you started taking her for granted.

But then again, sometimes we can forget that as a new employee it can take weeks or months (hopefully not years) to know if you fit in this new environment you have joined. It takes time to figure if you belong, and if you feel appreciated, and a really long time to get comfortable with Dan in Customer Service and his issues with personal hygiene and poor taste in music.

When looking over our own job posting as if I were an applicant, an when looking across others, I under the job application fatigue I think many hopeful applicants can develop. Swipe Right if you think you qualify and have a good attitude? Do we need a Tinder-like application for job hunting…??? Should job hunting, and job posting, be more like writing a biography and more like creating a dating profile? Given some of the resumes I have read over the years, I wonder if this method would be an improvement.

Now, I say much of this tongue-in-cheek, but maybe there’s some actual sanity to this madness I speak of.

Many people out there leverage dating sites and the algorithms they incorporate into their match-making to find a potential date, boy/girl-friend, wife/husband, or a one-night stand. If these algorithms are something we are using for something that would seemingly be such an important process/choice in our life (or maybe just that night), would they be good enough for us to leverage for our process of seeking career opportunities?