Online Dating vs. Recruiting: a Comparison (Part I)

Imagine that you’ve ranked the final top three of the eight candidates you’ve short-listed and have told them a decision will be made within 24 hours. Also imagine that, even though the application deadline passed two weeks ago and you’ve finished interviewing and short-listing, you just can’t resist doing these things:

 

• checking out the late-comers
• re-visiting the other resumes you have on hand
• re-posting the ad (perhaps under an alias)
• making fresh demands of the existing finalists
• using “buyer’s/vendor/s remorse” as an excuse to look for someone else
• offering the same job to more than one candidate
• not returning calls or emails from the finalists (as well as those from the mass of applicants)
• breaking promises to them
• withdrawing your support on a whim
• using the search for someone special as an excuse for treating no one as special.

So you do it, find someone(s) you like better, for now, and (don’t) express your regrets as you pull the plug on those now confused, angry and bitterly disappointed erstwhile finalists.

Applying Online Dating Tactics in Recruiting—How Smart is That?

Maybe they should be used to this, especially if they’ve ever done any online dating, which may serve as a warning or, quite oppositely, a template for other business operations, including recruiting.

That’s how way too many people treat each other on Internet dating sites—especially the ones who are “players” or “(pseudo)perfectionists”. What is instructive is to translate these tactics into the idioms and formats of recruiting—and then see

1. Whether there are any online dating tactics that do or could conceivably work in recruiting
2. Why most of the ones that are “successful” on dating sites would nonetheless never work in a recruiting environment.

(A third question, whether successful recruiting strategies, tactics and techniques could be successfully applied to online dating to improve its tone, processes and outcomes, will have to be saved for another day.)

The Top Online Dating Tactics

To make the analysis and comparison as transparent as possible, the following represents a general, abstract formulation of the tactics online dating seekers and subscribers commonly use.

In Part II, these are explained in detail and examined for their (in)applicability to and implications for recruiting:

1. Never accept a substantial opportunity cost(i.e., don’t pass up the chance to entice anyone who seems equally or more enticing than the birds in the hand).
2. Keep all “investments” highly liquid (commitments and promises of commitments should last only as long as they are useful).
3. Always indulge “(near) buyer remorse” and “vendor regret” when you feel like it (dump about-to-be-hired or already recruited candidates at will because of regret).
4. Try to find someone “special” while looking for someone else even “more special”(by using the quest for someone “truly special” as a ploy for attracting, yet never committing to, him or her).
5. Coldly pursue warm relationships (by callously dismissing all but the perfect match).
6. Sabotage yourself (by using goal-subverting tactics, such as looking for someone special by treating no one that way).
7. Opportunistically and capriciously change your criteria and offers.
8. Overbook (over-commit, by juggling multiple-relationships).
9. Harshly trumpet the negative, i.e., what you don’t want and those who “need not apply” .
10. Be too cautious to meet a genuinely attractive prospect (from fears about personal safety, personal adequacy or possible disillusionment).
11. Be too ready to commit without ever meeting(like one friend of mine who has for eight years maintained emotionally intense, daily communication with a woman thousands of miles away, whom he has never, ever met—not even once).

Recruitment Lessons from and Similarities to Online Dating

In reflecting on whether and why you do or do not employ or consider adopting any of the foregoing tactics, you will either gain a better understanding of what you are doing right or of how to do some things better.

Despite whatever initial incongruity a comparison of online dating and recruiting suggests, the fact remains that both industries survive and thrive—either because of or despite their differences and similarities, e.g., frequently failing to reply when contacted by the hopeful and earnest.

What is of great interest and usefulness is to understand the advantages, limitations and drivers of these two seemingly disparate business models and to learn from them.

Yes, for all its social warts and emotional frustrations, online dating is a monetized bottom-line (as well as pick-up-pick-out-line) driven business, with structuring and management of the client experience at its core—just as it is in recruiting.

Moreover, like corporate recruiting, it is a two-tiered recruitment platform, with the front-line subscribers and members doing as much recruiting of their prospects as the site owners and administrators—who, in many, if not most instances, not only tolerate the tactics used by site members on each other, but in fact depend on them for commercial success. (When a company recruits an HR recruiter to recruit talent, it is using a comparable two-tiered model.)

In Part II, the details of a comparative analysis of online dating and recruiting tactics will reveal the deep divides, similarities, lessons and concepts (such as “triangulation” and “primary vs. secondary narcissism”) that emerge from a toe-to-toe match-up between them.

To the extent a point-by-point, no-holds-barred comparison of online dating  and corporate recruiting methods, ethics and practices will serve as a tool, a warning or an inspiration for recruiters, it promises to be like both a tactically-driven boxing match and a bad marriage.

Very instructive.