4 Reasons Why Job Hunting Is Like Dating

1. Personal Profile

Much like your dating profile on dating apps, your personal profile be it on LinkedIn or Job Portals are highly crucial in determining whether you get a reply from the jobs you’re interested in or not. Whether you’re considering switching your line of work or looking for your next career challenge, we could all get better at positioning our personal brand in the market.

2. Helpful “Stalking”

Elena Chow, Partner at ConnectOne advice job seekers to show a demonstrate a deep level of interest to their prospective employer. She shared the following example.

3. First Impression

Just like how you would spend hours picking and then re-picking your outfit for your first date, the same level of preparation is put into appearing smart and clean to your interviewers. Why? It’s all to create that stellar first impression so that they remember you positively and hopefully, you stand out from the sea of candidates they have been speaking to all day.

However, your appearance isn’t the only factor when it comes to forming first impressions. What many job seekers forget is how they come across during the job interview itself when they are answering questions and speaking to their interviewers for the first time. This moment can be highly impactful and can make or break your interview, making the interviewer either sit up a little more and lean in to listen or subtly strike off your name with their pen as they allow their mind to wander to where they should go for lunch as you ramble on.

Roger Grant, the Co-founder of PERSONNA, a leadership development company focused on the people side of transformation, kindly shared the repercussions of being loquacious for the wrong reasons during an interview as well as a relatable analogy to help us understand his point better.

4. Conversation

Once a great first impression has been established, the journey does not end there. In order to successfully get your date to agree to go out with you on a second date, in this case, to hear back from your interviewer, you have to make sure your conversational skills are on-point. Chow encourage job seekers to be “persistent, without being irritating and to be humble about their gaps in their competence.” Now this can be harder than it looks and it’s really about maintaining that delicate balance between selling yourself and humility.

Abigail Lim, the Senior Talent Acquisition Partner at ExpressVPN, shared her views on this point as well on how she notices many job seekers these days being too rash on judging the companies they successfully manage to score an interview at.