Ive never been on Tinder.
One of the many upshots of being happily married is that my dating boots are well and truly hung up. Dating, is quite simply, the worst activity in the world. Tinder is an application that reduces the process to a swipe of the hand. The app throws up images of potential partners on your smartphone. You then express your interest through the power of a green tick or, if they dont float your boat, a red cross. As Roy on Catchphrase used to say Hes good but hes not the one .. Or something of that ilk.
I am not sure I couldve hacked such a concept. The thought of the sniggers and jeers emitted from a group of girls who happened to be so unfortunate as to come across my visage on Tinder is enough to bring me out in cold sweats. Rejection is hard enough in real life, so the image of someone swiping your best-taken photo away with an indignant sneer is, to me, soul destroying. The process was hard enough in real life. Plucking up all my courage to approach a potential partner on a night out brings back horrible memories. No, I dont come here often and help, help Im reaching for the pepper spray are phrases that still send shivers down the old lumbar-thoracic region.
Only joking.
Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times wrote last week that the recruiting process should take the approach of Tinder, in this great article. Her idea was to place the recruitment process firmly in the realms of dating, and rely on the Tinder-like method of green ticking and red crossing the candidates that strike you as an immediate match to your potential opportunity. She also highlights the two way nature of such a process. Candidates have to be equally enamoured by the potential opportunity they are applying for. Tinder would allow them to get an instant feel for the job, swipe away the baddies and keep the goodies.
At Kloodle, we love the simplicity of the idea. Wouldnt it be great if we could green tick a great employee, or job we desired, and make the right decision? Think of all the headaches that would be saved by such a method. Itd be great. Recruitment managers could play golf for four-and-a-half days a week, spending a half day furiously swiping to fulfil their organisations human resource needs. A great employee would walk through the door on Monday morning, be an instant hit, and the HR manager could get back to his or her golf. The company could switch the electricity off in the HR managers office and save a couple of quid to boot. Everyone is a winner!
The reality is probably much, much worse.
We humans are great at filling in the gaps. The human brain is designed to create mental models, and using these, make assumptions about our surroundings. For instance, a proficient reader will never actually look at the letters in a word. The brain has created a mental model to recognise the shape of the words and guesses what they are. You are essentially on autopilot, your brain guesses. You save energy, and everybody is happy.
Our mental models extend to decision making.
We are all loaded with pre-conceived ideas and perceptions of the world. These models form the opinions we have and the decisions we make. They are a result of our experiences, and they influence everything we do. Such mental preconditioning and ideas would render us terrible at making a snap decision for a recruitment hire. Our Tinder swiping would probably result in train wrecks of hires. People so bad that we cringe to think we ever liked them in the first place. Well sob into a bowl of Ben and Jerrys at our ineptitude and vow never to make the same mistake again, only to repeat the process the week after.
Or am I talking about dating again? Anyway, we need something more robust than Tinder.
In the age of the internet, there must be better ways. Google is the worlds most used and powerful search engine. It has an algorithm of patentable complexity, and is so smart it even guesses what we are thinking. When we type in a search term, the website with the most relevant content appears at the top. Want to know about birds? Type birds into Google the RSPB website will probably appear at the top (I dont know, Google it and find out!). If we can rank websites in terms of relevance, why cant we do the same with people?
We are creating enough content on our social media profiles to furnish such a service. If the Royal Bank of Scotland want to find a graduate with an interest in banking who plays team sport, then they should be able to search for such a person, and the most relevant individual will appear at the top. The search would be furnished by the content that individual creates on the internet. So only people who write regularly about banking, play team sports at a weekend and have shown an aspiration to become a banker will appear on the RBS radar.
And thats what we are striving to do at Kloodle. At the point of graduation, an individual will possess a plethora of soft skills but a limited amount of work experience. They need a forum to showcase the skills they possess and their employability. Kloodle provides that platform.
A great Kloodle profile will contain blogs, videos, work uploads and pictures, all designed to evidence a students skill set. Employers can search through this rich information, information that actually demonstrates the skills an employer needs, and engage with potential future hires. Such content will enable employers to rank students in terms of their relevance to the opportunities that they have available.
With the CV on its last legs, students and graduates need a professional forum to tell their story. Kloodle is that forum.
