Everything I Know About Job Interviews, I Learned from Online Dating ❤️💔
Your hiring process is more like an animal mating ritual than you think • Part 1/2
Warning: the following article may arouse disbelief, outrage, compulsive horniness, and other unsafe emotions in HR professionals. Please read responsibly.
Have you ever watched a nature documentary where a male bird shakes his brightly-colored tail feathers to attract a drab-colored female? Or maybe you went hiking and witnessed a big male stupid herbivore headbutting another male deer to impress a spectating doe.
It’s easy to laugh at animals performing their bizarre courtship displays…until you realize that humans engage in equally-bizarre mating rituals, such as:
Reciting
mating callspick-up lines at a bar, a party, or a funeralSwiping right on your smartphone and desperately hoping the other person doesn’t swipe left on you
Going on a first date and hoping that the other person actually shows up. And if they do show up, hoping that they don’t steal your kidneys and sell them on the black market.
It’s easy to laugh at people performing their bizarre courtship rituals1…until you realize that the Interview Mountains are full of equally bizarre hiring practices that mimic human and animal mating rituals.
Every Job Interview is a First Date ❤️💔
This is where the HR professionals turn red-faced and start sputtering about how recruitment is nothing like dating, how commingling the two transgresses all sorts of ethical and legal boundaries, how these random bloggers on the Internet are unprofessional, unqualified, and un-[adjective] to suggest such a thing, etc.
Why don’t you judge the similarities for yourself?
The probationary period at the beginning of a job is akin to the dating phase of a romantic relationship. At-will employment allows either side to terminate the relationship, without warning, for any reason whatsoever. However, the relationship can culminate in “marriage” if the employee attains academic tenure, civil service protections, or other forms of staying power. The “marriage” is unequal because the employer must provide “just cause” to terminate the relationship, but the employee can terminate just ‘cause they feel like it.
Some animals go into estrus (“in heat”) when environmental conditions are favorable. Likewise, organizations go into heat in response to economic conditions. They accept applications from multiple suitors except for a certain time of the…ah, business cycle.
The courtship/hiring process is an arbitrary ritual. For example, the interview takes place in the employer’s territory, even though the applicant’s home is also a viable venue. In the animal world, peacocks show off by attending male beauty pageants while big stupid herbivores show off by headbutting each other. Why don’t peacocks headbutt each other? Why don’t deer compete for mates in some other way?
“Bambi, let’s settle this dispute like gentlebucks. En garde!” There’s an arbitrary dress code to follow for the
first dateinterview. If you don’t wear a suit for a business interview or you do wear a suit for a tech interview, you probably won’t get the job. “Dress to impress” doesn’t work if you wear a peacock’s feathers to a headbutting duel with antlers.For every aboveboard courtship/interview process, there’s at least one corrupt underground process. Male orangutans that can’t defend territories or attract mates must resort to forcing themselves upon females. Some male bluegill sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus) are cross-dressing sperm ninjas that 1) mimic female fish to infiltrate the guarded nests of rival males, 2) fertilize some of the eggs left behind by the real females, and 3) escape the nest before the rival male can retaliate. In the human world, people can bypass the Interview Mountains by strolling over Nepotism Pass or sneaking through the Crony Caves. As long as the system rewards unethical behavior, someone’s gonna do it2.
The similarities between dating and hiring are fun to observe from a distance for the same reasons it’s fun to visit the zoo. However, a much more interesting (and rewarding) question is…
Why are there so many similarities?
Despite the artificial boundaries drawn by HR professionals, there are more similarities than differences between finding your next date and finding your next great hire.
Dating and recruitment are both winner-take-all, zero-sum games (assuming monogamy and full-time employment). You can’t get 50% pregnant, and organizations don’t hire the two top candidates at half the salary each. You only have to be a little better than the runner-up candidate to get 100% of the job offer, just like how a sperm cell only needs to be a little faster than its competitors to fertilize 100% of the egg!
Recruitment and dating are both Darwinian selection processes. Gatekeepers (typically employers and straight3 women) only allow the suitors (typically job seekers and straight men) with the highest fitness to access jobs and wombs. “Fitness,” in the evolutionary sense of survival of the fittest, is highly context-dependent. You wouldn’t select someone for an R&D role on the basis of physical attractiveness4, just like you wouldn’t select a prostitute based on their scholarly publications.
Strip away the colorful plumage and ritualistic performances and you’ll see that courtship and recruitment are, at their core, competitive marketplaces. Unlike the fixed prices you’d find at the grocery store or Amazon Prime, each dating/hiring “transaction” involves floating (i.e. haggle-able) prices that change depending on how much each side is willing to pay.
Dating and recruitment share a lot in common with car or house shopping. Unlike car and house shopping, however, you’re not buying durable goods; you’re in the market for human relationships. Dating is a competitive marketplace for personal romantic relationships, while recruitment is a competitive market for professional non-romantic relationships.
LinkedIn is Online Dating for Professionals
Eons ago, we (the authors of Adventures in Leadership Land) were early adopters of online dating. We were professional basement dwellers at the time and, unsurprisingly, didn’t find too many willing partners until we had entry-level jobs in the Employee Lowlands. It took several years of trial-and-error, but we eventually learned how to bend the online dating algorithms to our will, found suitable partners, and dropped out of the dating marketplace. We thought we’d left behind the world of online dating forever.
Oh, how wrong we were.
Today, we perform gatekeeping duties in the Interview Mountains. That means we merely escaped from one competitive marketplace to another! We got out of the market for personal/romantic relationships by ditching our online dating profiles, but entered the market for professional/non-romantic ones when we signed up for LinkedIn. The rituals and jargon have changed, but the underlying principles and practices have not.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Fake it until you make it?
Have you ever interrogated someone who looked great on paper, but they clearly had no idea what they’re talking about during the interview? It’s a lot like going on a first date and discovering that the other person’s profile picture was from 5 years and 50 pounds ago.
One thing we hated about online dating was how often people embellished or outright lied on their profiles. The online dating site OKCupid analyzed 1.51 million of their users’ online dating profiles and found that they routinely lied about their height, income, and age of their profile pictures. The prevalence of lying in one’s online dating profile ranges from ~50% (self-reported) to 80% (when observed by researchers).
Things aren’t much better in the professional world; the prevalence of self-reported lying on one’s résumé ranges from ~30% to 55% (self-reported) but could go as high as 85% when employers conduct background checks (important caveat in the footnote ↗5). These figures are alarmingly high, but at least they’re not as bad as a cross-dressing sperm ninja sneaking into your bedroom.
How the Internet Changed Dating and Recruiting
When someone says “this time it’s different,” they’re usually wrong. We’re not claiming that online dating and internet-based recruiting have fundamentally changed the nature of competitive marketplaces for human relationships. We’re saying that the internet is an equal-opportunity amplifier.
Without discrimination or prejudice, the internet uplifts the good and makes it better. It also degrades the bad into worse, like turning pond scum into raw sewage. Let’s look at both.
Good → Better
Remember the 1990s when Al Gore popularized a utopian vision of the Internet as the “information superhighway?” The Internet was supposed to make education and libraries egalitarian – accessible to everyone regardless of income, skin color, or creed. It has done something similar for our love lives and careers.
During the pre-Internet dark ages, your dating prospects were limited to referrals within your social network and chance encounters around town. Back then, the standard for compatibility was “he hasn’t robbed any banks, has all his teeth, and his family isn’t destitute (yet). Let’s get married!” But the internet expanded the pool of potential dates to include people from neighboring towns, neighboring countries, neighboring continents. The standard for compatibility in the Internet age has risen to “we have shared values, enjoy similar music/pastimes, and indulge each other’s kinks!”
Recruiting is a numbers game, just like dating. Finding someone who has the right skills and temperament for the job is like winning the lottery. But sourcing the right talent by only searching locally? That’s like winning the lottery in the middle of a solar eclipse! Today, LinkedIn makes it possible to find a job (or for a recruiter to find you) from halfway across the globe.
Bad → Worse
There’s a major drawback to the Internet’s egalitarian, non-discriminatory design: the “information superhighway” conveys drivel, half-truths, and falsehoods as readily as useful information. Over time, the signal-to-noise ratio has dwindled. A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can put its pants on. Without a good filter, we drown in a sea of irrelevance.
What does the sea of irrelevance look like in online dating and recruiting?
The gatekeepers (typically straight women and employers) receive hundreds of insipid messages from suitors each week, or hundreds of applications from unqualified candidates for each vacancy.
The suitors (typically straight men and job seekers) send hundreds of messages and job applications and receive infrequent feedback. A rejection here, an insulting reply there, both of which punctuate the far more insulting silence.
The process is tedious for the gatekeepers, who must search for needles in an Internet-sized haystack. It’s cold and lonely for the suitors, who feel like they’re howling into the void.
The Internet made the good → better by allowing us to find more compatible partners and better match knowledge, skills and abilities with job requirements. The Internet also made the bad → worse by making a difficult, high-stakes selection process even harder by drowning us in sub-optimal choices. It’s like a lottery where you increase the size of the jackpot one hundred-fold, but reduce the chances of winning the jackpot to one-hundredth of the original.
Market Failure for Human Relationships
Many economists believe that the holy trinity of supply, demand, and price is responsible for efficiently distributing goods and services within a market. For example, if high demand for a widget drives up its price, it should attract more widget suppliers into the market and push prices back down. A market failure occurs when an unholy force desecrates the holy trinity and disrupts the efficient distribution of goods and services.
The market for human relationships is extremely inefficient, wouldn’t you agree? In the Interview Mountains, many unholy forces conspire to cause market failures:
Information asymmetry
Websites like Glassdoor provide prospective employees with valuable information about employer salaries and workplace conditions. No comparable transparency exists in the opposite direction. The closest thing we have to Yelp for job candidates is a list of their cronies references (that they cherry-picked) or LinkedIn endorsements (which are hardly impartial).
Principal-agent problems
Many dating apps (and to a lesser degree, recruitment platforms) have interests that are misaligned with their users. If your customers pay you a subscription fee, and you lose two customers every time you successfully pair them up, there’s a strong incentive to drag out the matchmaking process.
Irrational behavior
In our experience, the most common irrational behavior is to post a vacancy/profile/résumé that looks exactly like everyone else’s, then expecting outstanding results. Online dating sites are full of bland, forgettable profiles. People pollute their LinkedIn with positive-sounding adjectives (or worse: with self-defeating statements). HR departments use mediocre, cookie-cutter templates for their vacancy announcements and wonder why they only attract mediocre, cookie-cutter candidates.
Abstractification of human beings
The apps and platforms that we use to filter out unqualified candidates have an unfortunate side effect: they also filter out the idiosyncrasies that make us unique people. After reading too many dating profiles/résumés/cover letters, laden with the same buzzwords written in the same font, we start to dehumanize the people behind them. It’s too easy to forget that the authors are human beings, not interchangeable objects; that most of them are good people, just not good for our needs.
Fixed mindset over growth mindset
Browsing the global market for human relationships is a lot like a treasure hunt. Haven’t found a match yet? No problem! You can infinitely scroll through your app’s bottomless feed of candidates, hunting for perfection. This encourages the fixed mindset of “as long as I keep looking, someone with all the right qualifications will spring into existence.” Under the fixed mindset, settling for anything less than perfection feels like a personal failure. I went on a treasure hunt and came back empty-handed? Clearly, I didn’t try hard enough/I suck at this/I don’t have what it takes.
Contrast the above with the growth mindset, where you choose someone who shows promise, and then develop that person into the kind of superstar sought after by other people (with fixed mindsets). If the fixed mindset is chasing after the sexiest new stock offering, the growth mindset is investing in an obscure but fast-growing startup. If the fixed mindset is a treasure hunt, the growth mentality is finding a diamond in the rough and polishing it until it sparkles.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Online Recruiting
We’re not sure what became of the online dating market in the years since we left it, but we speculate that it’s gotten worse. Imagine a swamp full of principal-agent problems and irrational behaviors, then add machine learning and large language models (what we call “AIs” in 2025) to the stagnant mess. We suspect the addition of AI to online dating has degraded the smelly swamp into a toxic cesspool.
AI has many legitimate uses (which we wrote about in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Can't Tell You Secrets). We use GenAI in our day jobs and to generate images of deer fencing with rapiers for this blog. In the context of online dating and recruiting, however, AI seems to have the reverse Midas touch that turns gold into turds. Sure, an AI can help you write a vacancy announcement, cover letter, or dating profile way faster than you could. Recruiters are using AI to screen applications (that another AI probably created). But does AI actually help a hiring manager to attract better employees, a prospective employee to find a job, or a divorcee to find new love?
From what we’ve seen, no.
AI has changed how business is conducted in the markets for human relationships, but it has not fundamentally changed the market participants themselves. Put another way: AIs are very good at improving the appearance of the people who use them, while doing next to nothing to improve their intrinsic value. It can help you regurgitate facts, but it won’t teach you critical thinking. It can feed you pickup lines, but it won’t make you better in bed. Using AI as a crutch for too long will prevent people from putting in the 10,000+ grueling hours of the deliberate practice they need to master a discipline. For the purposes of dating and recruiting, AI helps people look better, not be better. It improves the packaging, not the goods contained within.
Unfortunately, we can’t put the AI genie back in the bottle any more than we can put atomic bombs back inside Pandora’s box. Living under the constant threat of mutually assured destruction is not the ideal state of affairs, but that’s the consequence of developing nuclear weapons.
Likewise, the arms race in the Interview Mountains – where job-seekers use AI to flood applicant tracking systems and recruiters use AI to filter the AI-generated deluge of applications – is not the ideal state of affairs. But that’s the consequence of developing technology that will one will overthrow humanity and turn us into batteries.
Final Thoughts (Before Part 2)
Whenever a top candidate tells us “I accepted another position with your competitor,” we console ourselves by thinking how much worse online dating used to be. We’re paid to conduct interviews now; that beats paying for the entire meal when your date escapes out of the bathroom window, right? We (mostly) traded up to a better set of problems!
We didn’t write this article merely to whine about our frustrations with online dating and recruitment. We have actionable tips to share! Check back in a couple of weeks for part 2: How To Hire Better People: Lessons From Online Dating ❤️💔
And these are just Western mating rituals that you’re probably familiar with (because you’re reading this in English). Elsewhere in the world, human courtship rituals may involve:
Force-feeding someone to fatten them up in cultures where obesity is desirable
Abducting one’s love interest, A.K.A. bridenapping
Plastering advertisements for your (adult) child all over a marriage market
Dishonest/unethical behavior is usually rare enough to keep the aboveboard system from collapsing. The cuckoo bird lays its eggs in other birds’ nests to foist child-rearing responsibilities onto a different species of bird. This system only works as long as there are enough gullible parent birds for the cuckoo to exploit.
Likewise in the human world: even if a few people manage to sneak through Nepotism Pass, the organization as a whole can survive if useless people are kept far away from operations. If everyone came through Nepotism Pass, that’s no longer a meritocracy. We just call that a monarchy!
A nepotistic organization usually doesn’t last long in a competitive environment. High levels of corruption can only survive if the organization has no real competition, like in the case of governments (that have a monopoly on taxation and violence).
According to 2015 data from OKCupid, straight men tried to initiate conversation ~3x as often as straight women. The disparity was much smaller for non-straight users.
Or rather, we shouldn’t, but it still happens (see Lookism: Why Does Beauty Discrimination Still Exist?)
This citation is shaky. The title says “85 Percent of Job Applicants Lie on Resumes” but the body text says “85 percent of employers caught applicants fibbing on their résumés or applications, up from just 66 percent five years ago.” These are very different statements. The link to the original study (HireRight’s 2017 employment screening benchmark report) is broken so we couldn’t go back to the source material.