Yes, Love Has Become a Recruitment Process

Layla has a gift… a gift from the future.

She can reject someone in four seconds flat.

No guilt. No hesitation. Straight to the bin.

But what if I tell you that she’s not a recruiter? She’s doing it to find a life partner.

“I swiped left on 43 men last Tuesday,” she told me over coffee. “43. I didn’t even blink.”

She was mildly proud. Mostly horrified.

She’s been doing talent acquisition (yes, she’s a recruiter) for a mid-size tech company. Every morning, she opens a dashboard. Résumés flood in by the hundreds. Each one represents an actual human being — someone who stayed up late tweaking their font, agonising over whether to bold their internship, Googling “should I use a two-column layout.”

She looks at each one for about seven seconds.

Then she decides.

It wasn’t until her friend pointed it out that Layla actually heard herself.

“You basically do the same thing on Hinge… or Tinder.”

Layla laughed.

Then she stopped laughing.

Because her friend was right.

Profile photo: too dim. Occupation: “entrepreneur.” First prompt answer: “I’m equally comfortable in a suit or sweatpants.”

Pass. Pass.

And pass.

Then, swipe left.

The criteria she’d never apply to a résumé — vibes, photo angles, the energy of a caption — somehow became the entire basis for ruling out a person. A whole, complicated, interesting person. Gone in seven seconds.

The part that really gets her isn’t the swiping.

It’s the searching.

On every dating app, the profiles are infinite. There’s always another one loading. Always another face. Another bio. Another man holding a dog that probably isn’t his.

And somewhere in that endless scroll, Layla started doing something she also does at work.

Waiting for the perfect candidate.

You know the one. The person with exactly the right experience but somehow also the perfect personality. Never a gap in their résumé. Ambitious but not intimidating. Humble but not insecure. Creative but structured.

“We’ll know them when we see them,” hiring managers always say.

They never see them. Because that person doesn’t exist.

The same logic migrated to her love life.

The guy who’s emotionally available AND exciting. Who texts back quickly but isn’t clingy. Who has his life together but still makes time. Funny but deep. Driven but present.

“I’ll know when I feel it,” Layla says.

…and she’s still scrolling.

Then there are the bios.

Every recruiter knows the résumé version of this problem.

“Results-driven professional with a passion for excellence and… a proven track record.”

Says nothing. Means nothing. Sounds exactly like the other 200 applications in the pile.

Dating bios have the same disease.

“I live for good food, good music, and good vibes.”

Cool. That’s everyone. That’s literally every person alive.

“Looking for my partner in crime.”

Sir. That is a Bonnie and Clyde reference. You want someone to commit crimes with. That’s your pitch.

“Fluent in sarcasm.”

Nobody who writes this is actually funny. Funny people don’t announce it. They just show up and ruin your mascara.

Everyone is packaging themselves. Curating. Optimizing.

Which means nobody is actually showing up.

And when you finally match, and the conversation starts, it’s not two people talking. It’s two people performing. Trying to seem interesting without looking like they’re trying. Saying clever things before the other person gets distracted by the 40 other conversations happening in parallel.

Exhausting doesn’t begin to cover it.

Here’s the moment that changed something for Layla.

A few months ago, she nearly archived a résumé without reading it. The formatting was slightly off. The applicant had stayed in the same role for five years, which her system flagged as “low growth trajectory.”

Something made her actually read it.

Turned out, the reason the candidate stayed five years was that he’d built an entire department from scratch. The messy formatting was because he’d written it himself without a template — which, if you know what to look for, usually means the person isn’t pretending to be something they’re not.

He became one of their best hires.

Layla thinks about that a lot.

She also thinks about a man named Tariq, whom she swiped left because his first photo was taken in a dim light.

She ran into him at a mutual friend’s birthday… two months later.

How strange? Or it’s just how life works.

Tariq, it turned out, is the funniest person in any room. He volunteers on weekends. He speaks three languages. And the fluorescent lighting in that photo? It was a hospital corridor. He’d been visiting his father every evening for six weeks.

But she gave him just seven seconds.

Dating apps aren’t the villain here.

They’ve introduced real people who built real lives together. The technology works. Millions of couples have the screenshots to prove it.

But somewhere between the algorithm and the infinite scroll, a quiet shift happened.

People stopped being people. They became listings. Profiles to evaluate, compare, and replace the moment something marginally shinier appeared.

The app is just the door.

The problem is we started judging the entire house by the doormat.

And some of the most extraordinary people you’ll ever meet?

They have a terrible doormat.