It's Not You, It's Your Algorithm: Why Job Hunting Feels Just Like Modern Dating
👋 Guest post: An anonymous job seeker, looking for their next opportunity as a writer. Why don't we have a "tinder for jobs"? In this post the writer outlines why that isn't a good end goal.
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It’s a typical Monday morning. I’m lying in bed, my thumbs instinctively navigating to the usual suspects on my phone. I open up Hinge to see if the promising bloke I was chatting to last week has responded - nothing. Ghosted again. So I’m back to scrolling through an endless parade of bathroom selfies, men holding fish and the not-so-subtle references to being ‘hard to handle but worth it’. Next, a scroll through LinkedIn. Among the posts about what proposing to their girlfriend taught someone about B2B sales, I see a copy-paste message from a recruiter. Another generic job pitch, no doubt sent to a hundred other “top talents.” Recruiter breadcrumbing at its finest.
As I switch between apps, the parallels are impossible to ignore. Anyone who's played both the dating game and the job market hustle is all too familiar with their painful similarities. Building your CV feels like crafting the perfect dating profile - except instead of a strategically cropped gym pic, you're flaunting your Excel pivot table prowess and your ability "to achieve satisfaction across all touchpoints". The endless first dates echo initial recruiter calls with their mental checklists and probing questions (How flexible are you? How many positions have you held?). And the dreaded 'we're going with another candidate' hits just like 'you're amazing, but I didn't feel that spark’.
We bought into these grand promises: digitising recruitment and matchmaking would make everything easier: more efficient processes, better matches, smarter connections. Our soulmate, like our dream job or the perfect hire, was supposedly just a click or swipe away - data and sophisticated algorithms doing all the heavy lifting. Yet despite unprecedented access to options, finding 'the one' has never felt more exhausting.
The data tells a grim story. Dating apps are reporting record-low satisfaction rates; nearly 80% of dating app users have reported burnout, with nearly half blaming exhaustion on a failure to meet a good match despite spending nearly an hour a day swiping the apps. Meanwhile, the job market is a masterclass in irony, suffering from its own commitment issues: while three-quarters of employers struggle to fill positions, an equal proportion of job applications are rejected before a human ever sees them. We've created a paradoxical ecosystem where people are increasingly lonely despite endless connections, and companies can't find talent despite flooding inboxes with automated rejections.
Ghosting, Breadcrumbing, Benching
As these parallel systems evolved, they transformed human connection into just another online shopping experience. Users browse through potential partners like products, making split-second decisions based on curated photos and polished elevator pitches. Job seekers are reduced to keywords and algorithms, another profile to be rapidly sorted and filtered. By dehumanising these processes, we've normalised undesired behaviours - ghosting, once exclusively for failed romances, is now a corporate standard. Indeed's 2023 hiring survey found that 78% of job seekers have ghosted a prospective employer (up from 68% the previous year), while Hinge reports the exact same percentage of users getting ghosted in their love lives.
And ghosting is just the start of dating's modern lexicon infiltrating recruitment. Breadcrumbing - the art of stringing someone along with just enough attention to keep them interested - has gone corporate. Recruiters keep candidates warm with occasional "just checking in" messages and vague promises, without ever committing to a real offer. Then there's "benching" - keeping a runner-up candidate on the sidelines while courting your first choice, the professional equivalent of getting that midnight "u up?" text from someone who's probably messaging five other people.
Forever Shopping, Never Buying
Behaviours like ghosting, breadcrumbing, and benching aren't just byproducts of seeing people as disposable - they're the natural outcome of the digital age's biggest promise (and curse): unlimited choice. By removing the barriers of geography, social circles, and chance encounters, we've gained access to an endless pool of potential 'matches.' But this double-edged sword fuels a perpetual sense of FOMO. When the next best thing is always just a swipe away, it becomes harder to commit to the person in front of you—and far too easy to add them to your collection of 'maybe later' options.
This endless scrolling isn't just exhausting - it's changing how our brains approach decision-making entirely. Psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in "The Paradox of Choice" that an overabundance of options can be paralysing and lead to perpetual dissatisfaction. When we perceive our choices as practically infinite, we struggle to commit, always wondering if we've selected the best possible option. Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist studying romantic love, found that when people are presented with too many dating options, they tend to be less satisfied with their eventual choice and more likely to keep looking for alternatives. Sound familiar, hiring managers?
Looking for a Man in Finance (Trust Fund, 6'5", Blue Eyes)
And when unlimited choice meets impossible standards, the results are almost comical. "I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes" - this viral TikTok could easily be mistaken for a graduate job posting asking for a "22-year-old with 30 years of experience, fluent in 12 programming languages (including three that haven't been invented yet), willing to work for exposure and free pizza." Both worlds run on snap judgements and superficial checklists - your dating profile dismissed for your height, your CV rejected for a job gap. The result is a market where graduate positions require senior-level experience, senior-level salaries match entry-level expectations, and "Ninja" and "rockstar" appear in job titles without irony. Genuine potential lost to arbitrary filters.
The False Hope Factory
Perhaps the darkest parallel is how both systems have industrialised false hope. Dating apps are riddled with deception - over half of users report encountering fake profiles, some suspected to be kept artificially alive by platforms to maintain the illusion of endless possibility. Meanwhile, the corporate world has perfected its own version of catfishing: companies post phantom positions to harvest CV data, while automated bots masquerade as friendly recruiters with messages about "exciting opportunities perfectly matched to your profile." Real connections are diluted by fake profiles, ghost jobs, and automated rejections – all designed to keep you hopeful just long enough to part with your monthly subscription fee and dignity.
Bot Meets Bot
GenAI has burst onto the scene with its usual promises of 'disruption' - this time claiming to solve all our dating and recruiting woes. And I'm not just talking about AI companions - though would an AI boyfriend at least spare us the fish photos? At any rate, an AI manager is probably a dream promotion based on the majority of experiences I've had. At least algorithms make their expectations clear.
A plethora of startups have proliferated faster than red flags on a first date, each promising to be your digital wingman or Silicon Valley Yenta. Dating apps are evolving beyond their simple "swipe right if they're fit" algorithms - now they'll write your bio, craft your opening lines, coach you through your first date, and even ghost people on your behalf. Just ask Bumble's founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who envisions "a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges." (Well, maybe my AI bot will have better luck in love…). Meanwhile, the recruitment industry has been witnessing an AI arms race, with jobseekers and recruiters each deploying increasingly sophisticated tools. CV optimisers go head-to-head with screening bots, while tools like FinalRoundAI feed candidates real-time interview answers as AI interviewers scan for "leadership potential" and "cultural fit."
And here's where it gets really murky. GenAI is supercharging the art of deception. That perfectly lit profile pic? GlowupAI. That witty bio? Rizz. That charming voice note? Synthesised. Despite apps rolling out Height Detectors and Baldness Predictors, we're entering an era where distinguishing between authentic connection and algorithmic catfishing feels practically impossible. The same goes for job applications - when everyone's CV is AI-optimised and interview answers are AI-prompted, how do we spot the real talent from the well-programmed pretenders?
AI also threatens to supercharge our checkbox mentality. Imagine your dating AI assistant, trained on your past preferences, automatically filtering out anyone under 6 feet or over 30, while your job-hunting AI rejects any company that doesn't mention "unlimited PTO" in their benefits. Our digital matchmakers, armed with ever-more sophisticated filtering capabilities, will efficiently eliminate anyone who doesn't perfectly match our impossibly specific criteria - before we even get the chance to be surprised by someone who breaks our usual "type."
Even more concerning is how these AI tools risk amplifying existing biases. Dating apps already reflect society's prejudices - research shows Black women and Asian men consistently receive fewer matches and responses, while recruitment algorithms have been caught downgrading candidates based on their race, gender, or accent. As journalist Hilke Schellmann revealed in "The Algorithm," hiring and AI video tools that assessed facial expressions, accents and dialects penalised certain candidates, relying on false assumptions that these traits correlate with competence. When we train AI on human preferences and historical hiring data, we're not just digitising matchmaking - we're automating discrimination.
Yet despite these concerns, we're rushing to embrace our AI overlords. Over 60% of recruiters are optimistic about AI's potential to handle the mundane parts of hiring, while half of online daters are open to using AI as their digital Cyrano de Bergerac. And you can see why - it promises to reduce swiping fatigue, overcome social anxiety, and help craft the perfect opening message.
The key might be finding the sweet spot between efficiency and humanity. These tools have real value - they can help surface better matches, streamline administrative tasks, and even provide coaching for the socially anxious. But we need oversight and accountability. We need to push for transparency in how they're designed and deployed. Most importantly, we need to remember that while AI might help you land that first date or job interview, it can't have the actual conversation for you (yet). In 2024, authentic human interaction has become a luxury product - and maybe that's exactly why we need to preserve it.
Relationship status: Needs Human Connection
So in a world where algorithms increasingly mediate our connections, what's the answer? I'm not suggesting we all delete our apps and go back to meeting people at the local Wetherspoons, or printing CVs to hand out at Topshop. The digital revolution has given us possibilities previous generations never imagined - even if those possibilities mostly involve being rejected at scale.
But algorithms should be thought of as the starting point - not the whole story. They should be used to create opportunities for serendipity rather than trying to eliminate it entirely. Using technology to augment rather than replace our natural instincts. Dating apps like Thursday are already experimenting with hybrid spaces, while recruitment platforms like Vette AI are rediscovering the value of human oversight.
Before we blame the technology, it's worth asking - is it the algorithms behaving badly, or are we? These platforms didn’t create ghosting, breadcrumbing and other toxic behaviours - they just made them easier to execute. When there's always another profile to swipe on or candidate to consider, and an AI bot ready to handle the awkward conversations, why bother doing the emotional labour ourselves? But we need to remember that behind (mostly) every profile is a real person. That person you're about to ghost might have spent their weekend crafting the perfect thoughtful response to your message. That candidate you’re keeping warm might be putting their job search on hold waiting for your feedback. Yes, sending a ‘thanks, but no thanks’ message feels about as comfortable as admitting that gym photo is from 2014, but sometimes being a decent person means doing the uncomfortable bits yourself - no matter how tempting it is to let the robots handle our rejection.
And while we’re being honest with ourselves, we might also need to recalibrate our expectations. We’ve turned dating and recruitment into a peculiar optimisation problem, as if happiness was just a matter of finding someone who perfectly matches our ever-expanding wishlist. We expect every job to fulfil our deepest purpose - somewhere along the way, ‘pays the bills’ transformed into ‘must align with my values, offer unlimited growth potential, save the world, while giving me enough to afford a house share in Islington’, and every partner to be our soulmate, best friend and therapist rolled into one, who can also help you upgrade that Islington house share.
Sometimes setbacks, compromises and stretches of disenchantment aren't bugs - they're features. Meaningful connection can’t be distilled down to a set of filters. "Soulmates" and "dream jobs" are made, not found. And maybe that's okay. Maybe instead of expecting every match to be "TheOneTM," we could focus on being someone worth matching with. Maybe I should give a guy holding a fish a go. Or at least send my AI bot.