Six dating lessons to find your perfect job match

A man and woman sitting on a bench. The couple are viewed from behind and in the background is a forest.

Turns out, you can learn a lot of career lessons from the world of dating.

Whether you’re looking to progress within your current role or looking for a new job entirely, believe it or not you can learn a lot from your dating experiences. Flowers and candy are probably not the best way to impress a potential employer but putting your best foot forward certainly will.

Here are the key lessons from the world of dating that you should be embracing in your career.

Embrace online

Everyone meets online these days. Gone are the days of wedding speeches centred on how the couple first locked eyes on the dance floor. Now, they first saw each other on their phone screens and were lured in by well-written profiles.

The same goes for jobs. Remember when jobseekers would post in their resumes and cover letters? Or when you looked at job ads in your local paper? Those days are well and truly gone.

Nowadays, to find the job of your dreams you need to be savvy online. You need to sell your skills and experience on your LinkedIn profile, get good at filtering through all of your job matches on Adzuna, and do your interview homework online too. You can treat Adzuna like Tinder or Bumble – we bring together all the jobs into one place so you can zero in on your perfect match faster.

If you’re looking to succeed in a job hunt, embrace online. Just make sure you choose a different profile picture for your professional profile!

Career cushioning

Cushioning in the dating world is pretty shady. Someone who is cushioning is entertaining other potential romantic options while they’re already in a committed relationship. It’s not necessarily cheating, but you’re absolutely seeing if the grass could be greener.

In careers, it’s far less hurtful. Career cushioning is a tactic more and more of us are expected to embrace during the cost of living crisis and we can do it in a number of ways. As well as seeing what’s out there, and spending time investigating the jobs market, it may also look like creating a side hustle so that you have an income outside of your regular salary.

Beware of ghosting

Ghosting isn’t nice, whichever way you look at it.

In the dating world, often it comes when you’re messaging (or even meeting up with) a potential beau, and suddenly they cease contact with no explanation. They’re often cushioning themselves and pursuing a few people at once so it’s worth knowing, it’s definitely not you, it’s them.

In the world of jobs, ghosting occurs when you apply for a job and don’t hear anything back, or much worse when you’ve had an interview and the employer ceases contact. Similarly, these long periods without communication could be a sign of internal disorganization, or signal that the hiring manager is interviewing even more candidates and can’t make their mind up.

Not getting feedback from a job can be incredibly demotivating but sadly there’s not much you can do about it. You should take solace in the fact it’s probably a sign that the employer don’t have the right processes in place to recruit, and that probably means they don’t have the right processes in place for other things too.

Ghosting can sometimes go the other way too, with candidates not getting back to employers. Even if your circumstances have changed and you’ve decided against pursuing a role, you should always do the courteous thing and let the hiring manager know. After all, you never know whether you will cross professional paths again in the future!

Watch out for red flags

A red flag in dating is when you start to notice signs that a person isn’t who you want to be with. Often, these red flags go ignored, and later down the line you may realize you should have paid more attention to them in the first place. It could be that someone doesn’t want you to meet their friends or family, and you find out later that’s because they have dysfunctional relationships with people due to things they have done before. The lesson we can all take is to pay attention to red flags, not ignore them.

The same goes for the job hunt. Red flags can pop up at any time during the job application process. In a job description, this might look like expressions such as “we’re one big happy family” which could mean that boundaries between work and home don’t exist, “we’re high energy” which may mean everyone is burnt out, or “we work hard, play hard” which could mean no one takes enough PTO.

At the interview stage, it’s important to ask questions to understand why the role is being advertised, what the company culture is like, and whether the management style of your superior works for you.

Put your best foot forward

We all want to project the best version of ourselves, especially when we enter the dating pool. This might look like us being more confident and chatty than usual, putting a little extra effort into what we choose to wear, or trying to be a bit more laid back than we would usually be.

Think about job hunting in much the same way. Project the best version of yourself at an interview. Keeping cool, calm, and confident, wearing clothes that make you look and feel good, and talking about just how perfect you are for the job.

Similarly, if you’re going for that promotion do the same thing. Show your employer that they couldn’t live without you, demonstrate enthusiasm, and say yes to things.

Cuffing season

Cuffing season refers to the months when singles hit the dating market hard. The idea is to find a partner (even short-term) who you can spend the winter months with. The cuffing season starts when the summer ends, the excitement of lots of events and activities wears off, and we naturally start to hibernate a bit more. On the plus side, there are loads of potential partners on the market, but on the negative side, it can be really overwhelming and mean that the people you like might have lots of other options.

The jobs market has similarly busy periods, although they don’t always fall on the same few months every year. For graduate positions, the cuffing season falls over the summer and fall months, as that is when a batch of new grads enter the jobs market at the exact same time. For everyone else, it’s less predictable. We saw a cuffing season that was caused by the pandemic when the jobs market began to open up and people felt they were in a more secure position to look for work. This phenomenon is widely referred to as the “Great Resignation” or “Great Reshuffle”.

These busy periods can mean the job market is incredibly competitive but they also mean that lots of new jobs hit the market, as people tend to move around. Keeping your finger on the pulse of these trends could be highly advantageous!

Feeling inspired by this dating-inspired advice and ready to look for the perfect match? Check out the latest jobs here.

Read more: The coolest US offices in 2023