Over the past year in recruiting, I have honed key skills skills and qualities. What began as a relatively dry blog post on the transferrable skills I’ve learned quickly turned into a comparison between recruiting and dating. Who knew they required the same skills?!
Resourcefulness: Also known as super-sleuthing. Give me a name and I can find the person’s contact information and their 10,567 social media profiles. Handy for finding a dream candidate on LinkedIn; handy for stalking a new guy before your first date.
Tact: Rejecting candidates requires a certain level of diplomacy, as does working with hiring managers. Rejecting a second date or initiating a break-up takes a similar level of finesse.
Networking: Critical in life; perfected in recruiting 
The best way to find a candidate and a date for the weekend.
Intuition: Call it what you will, but it’s a key quality that recruiters tend to have. Trusting your gut can prevent the hiring of a perfect-on-paper candidate and enable you to just say no to the seemingly sweet but possibly sketchy guy who keeps texting you.
Multi-tasking: The vast majority of recruiters are managing multiple requisitions simultaneously, so time management and the ability to multi-task are key. Multi-tasking helps in the dating world too: balancing your everyday life and your dating schedule or even helping you date multiple guys at once, if that’s your cup of tea.
Understanding of technology: Unless a company or agency is stuck in the dark ages of recruiting, their recruiters will be familiar and comfortable with technology, including applicant tracking systems, social media, and job boards. Today’s dating world requires the same skill set: the ability to navigate Match.com, eHarmony, OK Cupid, and do your due diligence on each guy {see resourcefulness}.
Metric-driven: Like salespeople, recruiters need to know and be able to articulate the ROI of their work through qualitative and quantitative metrics {cost-per-hire, retention rates, source-of-hire, etc}. In terms of dating? Uh, some people keep spreadsheets of their online dating interactions…
Ability to close: Hiring a candidate takes persistence, patience, and maybe even some hand-holding. Again, like a good salesperson, a recruiter must be able to close by working with different parties, soothing worries, and facilitating compromise. Securing a second date or taking a casual dating situation to a full-fledged relationship requires the same skills.
What other parallels can you think of? How is your job like dating?
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