Ask HN: Why are jobs gotten via referrals but online blind dating is now normal? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are jobs gotten via referrals but online blind dating is now normal?

56 pointstempsy56 comments

Seems like companies believe the best hire is connected to their existing workforce in some way e.g. well known that most jobs are sourced through some internal referral.

And yet as a society we've increasingly moved on to blind dating via dating apps like Tinder instead of meeting people via a mutual connection.

Logically you'd think the "optimal" strategy for hiring and dating would be similar. In this case, either via a mutual connection or not.

And yet we see this divergence in strategy. Why is that?

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Commitment in online dating is much more incremental than in job hiring. With a dating app (as I understand it, I haven't used them), the process is like:

1. Get matched.

2. Chat online back and forth.

3. Go on a date.

4. If that works well, maybe another, etc.

At any point, either party can call it off or just ghost. There are many easy exit points, so it makes sense for the top of the funnel to be as wide as possible in the hopes that a candidate makes it all the way through. There is little harm in taking at least the first step or two with many participants.

With hiring, interviewing uses valuable employee time. Once an offer is extended and someone is hired the company is effectively fully committed to them. The employee is even more committed since they likely quit their previous job.

I think the thing is people don’t necessary have infinite free time either. And if there’s an efficiency factor then wouldn’t more people think the quality of a potential match is higher with a friend of a friend rather than someone completely random?

I wonder if jobs will also move in this direction.

Open source seems to be the closest thing. It's possible to shift one's time between projects gradually.

I suspect the main obstacle is that it's hard for a salary to be gradual. We need a more sophisticated scheme. Something like automatic per-issue bounties.

“ Something like automatic per-issue bounties.” I physically shuttered at that thought. I get the intent, but having labored qualified and paid for in that way is sure to lead to a terrible issue system gamed by those “in the know” to exploit the rest.

Just need to be careful that you don't end up with even more snakes in Delhi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Maybe we just need a better way of doing short term contracts. If both parties can sign on to something that won't have huge negative consequences if it goes poorly then there's more room for experimentation. Dating already has these unwritten rules, meeting for a non-committal coffee, going out to dinner, going to a show, a bar, one night stands, and the gradient of casual relationships to marriage prospects. I think there used to be equivalents for these gradations in employment but so much formalization has built up around the hiring process that it's choked most of them out.

> I wonder if jobs will also move in this direction.

They already have, where there is any commitment at all; that's what formal probationary periods, earned tenure, and temp/contract-to-hire arrangements are.

Of course, much work has moved past even the idea of commitment on either side.

> I suspect the main obstacle is that it's hard for a salary to be gradual

It's not hard at all, plenty of jobs that are paid salary at the nearest approximation of a committed level can be acquired after a temp/contract-to-hire period which is paid hourly based on hours worked, without guaranteed hours and at a total rate that, even of full time hours are available, is less than post-hire salary+benefits.

Yes, but the rest of your life is a step function. I don't get to gradually pay my health insurance or mortgage.

I've hired numerous remote developers on an hourly basis and the process can be similarly incremental:

1. Screen for skills and experience

2. 15-30 minute technical interview over voice chat

3. Give them a 10-15 hour project (paid) that doesn't require much previous knowledge of the code base or other context

4. If that works well, escalate their responsibilities

5. If both parties are happy and the work is excellent then after awhile it naturally tends to turn into full time work

This is another benefit of remote teams: bad hires are cheaper and therefore your hiring funnel and talent pipeline can be more aggressive.

It may not be as incremental for the developer going through your hiring pipeline -- e.g. they would likely have to resign from a full time job that restricts them from working on other things before they can proceed to step 4 (perhaps before step 3 as well).

I spent much time thinking about this, and planning the process for dating (didn't feel good at it, as I don't intuit social situations quickly but have to think things over more, and have been a jerk before).

But met my now-wife online, and there are things I could have done better (like specific things to be better to people during the process), but these "process" notes I made from study helped me tremendously to have confidence, especially the "document" with its steps (about 1/2-way down): http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854586947.html (a simple site). It has some religious things, but I hope it and the links, if explored, can be useful to anyone. The point is to pursue happiness in things that last, even across our generations.

I don't think what you're saying is 100% true. When I was looking for a gf I asked my friends if they knew someone who I might like. I also tried online dating. Online dating ended up working eventually after a lot of trial and error but it would have but a lot easier if a friend could have given me an introduction to a validated person. Would a person a friend introduced be the optimal person for me? Maybe not, but it's someone I likely could have been with quickly who would probably have been at least pretty good. Online dating meanwhile is an awful slog even if it sometimes produces a better person at the end. The exact same thing applies with hiring, except the stakes are higher. I can date someone for a month or two, decide I don't like them, and move on. You can't do that with hiring.

My friends don’t know my dating criteria. Jobs can be well defined, but personal preferences are more difficult to express. Nuances matter.

The real problem is not with online dating but with fake accounts. I used to write well crafted letters that resulted in interesting dates. Now, I have no easy way of verifying I am not writing to a bot.

I think most people would prefer having a "referral" for dates (I know I would at least).

The cost of bad behavior is much higher if there's a third party involved (i.e. you're not just burning with me but also the person who introduced us).

Online dating on the other hand can be a cess pool of poor manners, since there's no social penalty for ghosting your date or misbehaving.

The reason that online dating has been on the rise is because it's easy, convenient, and turns potential suitors into a commodity.

I never wanted a referral dating. You are limited by your circle if you only go by friends of friends and usually missing out on some very interesting people / good looking people.

Depending on where you live and which circles you run in, your friends of friends can be a potentially huge dating pool

So you're saying your friends are ugly losers?

Whow whoa, hold on. Since when is Tinder a "blind date"? If anything, it's the exact opposite of a blind date.

So it's meeting someone via a mutual connection?

It is like meeting someone in a bar without the noise and through a hotornot interface.

I guess by blind I mean you did not know the person before and you have no known mutual connection to him or her.

A blind date doesn't have anything to do with whether the connection is mutual. A blind date is where you go on a date with someone you've never met, let alone seen. In Tinder, you not only get to see what the person looks like but you chat with them before the in-person date. There's nothing "blind" about it. In fact, blind dates barely exist in the internet age. The closest thing to a blind date today actually would be through a mutual connection. (e.g. your friend Steve convinces Tyler's sister to go on a date with you because he thinks you'll both get along, even though neither of you have met or seen each other)

Either I'm delusional or a relic of a different era.

In this particular case, I'm pretty sure it's the children who are wrong.

This is messed up but I feel like I get jobs and dates based on being white and non threatening, I’m not particularly great professionally or personally in my opinion

lol you may be right. Most of the time people are looking for some modicum of inoffensiveness rather than some super high bar

Yeah, I’ve seen people who are better developers than me up for the same jobs turned away, like I feel like I’m all I’m good for Is completely unrelated to my job and at this point I’m just like a friendly corporate ghost, or it’s all imposter syndrome on my part, it all seems pointless. I just want to watch the world not burn

This might cause flamewar, but I think job referrals work because there is clear monetary incentive, whereas, in the case of dating there is no such thing or its equivalent in terms of relationships for the referrer.

This is a biased assessment. In some cultures, mutual connection is still the goto for meeting and subsequently dating new people.

Because online dating is based on looks (initially at least) and jobs candidates are hired based on skill and personality. Looks are easy to judge in a few seconds, skills and personality are not.

Dating is roughly symmetric, but employment is not. Jobs are not just an employer picking an employee, but also an employee picking an employer. The current process saves time for one side, but wastes it for the other.

One of my dream side projects which never came to life is a job board where employers post (only) photos of what your workspace would look like. It's almost impossible to find out what I'm going to be looking at 8+ hours a day, even though that's one of the most important aspects of a job to me.

Agree. It's really, really to hide the fact that you're an asshole/selfish bad actor in an interview. It's also surprisingly difficult to gauge someone's skill for a job; just look at any HN thread on how to do interviews. A personal reference from a known entity goes a long way.

Companies are slow-moving. They legally can - but structurally cannot - decide one day that they're not that into you and move to a new state. If they bring in a bad employee, they have to first build up proof that they messed up, explain any mistakes to their customers, and ease other employees' concerns. If you've seen someone hired and fired from a white-collar job, the manager goes a lot of work trying to keep them on.

You might be tempted to compare this to relationships and divorce, but now you're making a totally different comparison. Going on a blind date, introducing them to your family, and marrying someone without any third-party verification are totally different things!

I think it might actually be the opposite.

Anecdata:

- <50% of the people who joined my team recently were referrals.

- >50% of my friends in "serious" relationships met offline.

I'm not sure what your experience has been, but in my experience friends set each other up with dates all the time. Tinder even tells you if you have mutual friends with someone.

Maybe because people are too busy with social media to have actual friends nowadays? :3

Follow the money. The other way of finding candidates — paying professional sourcers who do it for a living — costs an enormous amount of money, often 25% of the first year salary.

Paying your employees $5k or even $25k (in sfba) is a lot cheaper.

It's all about looks and even more so these days!

Side rant...why on okcupid do I get 40 likes ..send messages to ten or 15 of them and no response. Online dating sucks! Many of those likes are probably fake created by OkCupid.

Idk about OkCupid, but I really beleive on Tinder that about 1/3 of the profiles I see are just people plugging their social media to go followers and / or seek instant attention validation. I doesnt personally bother me, but it might explain in part about the matches / messages rate

Supply and demand. Good jobs get thousands of applicants, attractive people get swamped with messages. The more balanced the two sides, the better an online marketplace will be.

For jobs there's a competitive selection process, so referrals from people who passed the competitive screening are likely to be in a top percentile.

With friend networks, most people don't have a competitive selection process - you're friends because you went to school together, lived in same area, etc.. The referral for dating isn't as likely to be in a top percentile, so it makes sense to go and cast a wider net.

I think they're both for the reason that the less effort required the better. The faster you can hire someone that can do a job reasonably well the better off the company will be. Likewise in dating, you'll likely be much more successful if you don't have to put as much effort into finding dates/hookups.

I really don't think either situation is as binary as you make it. My latest company hired me through a recruiter and my current long term gf I met in lerson first. Have also had a shorter term thing over Tinder, which also went well. Either way, success is an organic thing after the first steps.

Maybe they are not so different.

Triplebyte is like Tinder, but for jobs/hiring no?

You fill up a profile, you can browse companies and indicate when one is a potential match for you (It's the same for companies, I guess).

If there is a match then you can contact each other.

shrug

If I don't have a dating life, no SO, no BF/GF, my life still goes on. I can still eat a nice pizza, go to the movies, etc. I can do this for several weeks or months.

If I don't have a job I don't get pizza, or movies, and could possibly get evicted. Sure, there are emergency funds to weather downturns, and FIRE is an option for some, but most people MUST have some sort of job in order to, like, eat.

This is my take:

-It would limit your possible mates based on your circle of friends.

-Some people want to keep their dating life quiet as involving others can sometimes stress out the situation.

-If things don't work out there is less risk of gossip within your group.

  blind dating via dating apps like Tinder

Tinder is the opposite of blind dating. Blind dating means that you've never seen your date's image beforehand.

The cost of a bad date is low. The cost of a bad hire is high.

A few obvious differences 1. Companies don’t hire based on how hot you are 2. Companies can’t ghost you at a moments notice once they have committed

> Companies don’t hire based on how hot you are

Well, not ideally, except for certain very specific jobs, but it absolutely does happen even outside of the cases where it ideally would.

> Companies can’t ghost you at a moments notice once they have committed

Established, reputable companies usually have trouble doing that; for others it's actually not unheard of, though it's hard to do it selectively to one employee and not others if you have on-premises staff.

I believe dating via referral is possible, it is more expensive.

It needs cultural support (parents) or more money to pay for a matchmaker.

Dating via referral is common even without matchmakers, payments, or parental involvement. Dating-related peer introductions are a pretty common thing.

People don't value emotional cost proportional to the damage it can cause; they usually do for money

online blind dating is not normal, if you can see pictures of the person and interact with them before the date I don't really see what is blind about it

The equivalent of online dating in hiring is contracting?

People are more personally isolated and priorities for relationships have changed.

You don’t necessarily want to hook up with a friend of a friend.

I think for me it's more the phenomenon that the "success rate" for online dating is so high.

Clearly it's possible to meet people who you have no existing connection with and end up finding your most intimate lifelong relationship with that person.

I guess if it's possible, and potentially even preferred, then it seems strange that most companies are so allergic to finding new hires "blind" in the same way.

you are conflating a lot of things here.

0. online dating isn't blind dating. physical attraction (important in most romantic relationships) is readily apparent generally.

1. AFAICT (non expert) blind date "success rate" varies immensely depending on whose PoV you assume. even those who get lots of matches may want long term, but only find short term options (or vice versa)

2. you probably don't want to start pulling people out of a hat to do dental procedures. credentialing is important to many people for certain professions. these things take years and years of training and skill building. most romantic things don't take the same sort of specialized training.

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