We keep coming back to the same comparison in our own meetings, and I still don't know what to do with it. Someone will say it almost as a throwaway line, that this should feel more like a ‘dating app’ than a delivery service… and everyone nods. And then the conversation moves on to something more measurable, like turnaround time or drop-off rates. But we do this often… too often to discard.
A delivery service has one job. You order the thing, and the thing arrives, and the only question anyone asks afterward is whether it arrived on time and in one piece. Most hiring, when you strip away the language around it, still works like this. A company places an order for a kind of person. Candidates get poured into the funnel like inventory. Somewhere at the bottom, a person gets delivered, and everyone moves on to the next order.
Dating apps, whatever else is wrong with them, are built on a different premise. Both sides are choosing. Both sides can be turned down. There's an asymmetry in confidence, sure, and probably in effort too, but the architecture at least gestures toward two people evaluating each other rather than one party auditioning for the other. I keep wondering what it would actually mean to build a hiring process on that premise instead of pretending to.
The word we keep using is gates. Not funnels, gates. A funnel only narrows in one direction — wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, and the only thing moving through it is the candidate, getting smaller and more processed at each stage. A gate is different. A gate can be approached from either side. It has to have a reason for existing that both parties can see, or it isn't a gate, it's just a wall with a form attached to it.
I don't have the design for this yet. I'm not sure it's a product feature at all — it might be closer to a posture, something you'd feel more in how a company writes its first message than in any specific screen. What would a "gate" look like on the company's side, not just the candidate's — some signal that the company has also been screened, has also had to clear a bar, has also revealed something it would rather keep vague. I don't know if candidates would even want that, or trust it if we offered it.
What I do know is that the discomfort of the delivery-service framing hasn't gone away just because we haven't solved it. Every time someone says the word "screen" in a hiring meeting, I hear a camera pointed one direction. And every time the dating comparison comes back up, unprompted, in a different meeting, from a different person, I take that as a small piece of evidence that we're circling something real, even if none of us can draw it yet.