11HiringThe Eerie Resemblance Between Hiring and Dating
My first kiss was during a game of seventh-grade spin the bottle. As I watched the bottle twirl round and round, I prayed for it to land on one of my crushes as my heart pounded so hard in my chest I worried others could hear it. My energy deflated when the bottle landed on a bespectacled boy with a bowl cut from my biology class, whose favorite pastime was making raptor noises behind me on the bus. The kiss was brief yet somehow damp, a cumbersome entry into adolescence.
The awkwardness of this first encounter, my blind hope for something magical, and the randomness of the outcome set the appropriate stage for years of dating to come. Growing up watching a steady stream of 1980s rom-coms had prepared me for this. What they had not prepared me for was the fact that romantic dating is not the only kind of dating that those in search of a happy ending must endure. The other kind—the kind none of us can choose to avoid—is the job interview.
The premise of romantic dating and job dating (aka interviews) is almost identical: two strangers sit in a room and have a conversation to decide if they can see a future together. They are stuck relying on conversation and affect as shitty stand-ins for the truth about what it will be like to collaborate in a meaningful way. Each party looks ...
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