The makers of the popular dating app Tinder have unveiled a new mobile app that allows employers to search for and find employees with a swipe of the finger. Dubbed “Blunder,” the app is in the final stages of beta testing and will be available to companies in the next few weeks.
“We think this is the wave of the future,” Tinder co-founded Justin Mateen says. “We’re going to bring an entirely new level of sophistication to the hiring process.”
For those who aren’t familiar, Tinder users log on to the site and are presented with pictures of potential matches in their geographic area. No other information is provided. If you like the picture you’re looking at, you move it toward ‘Yes,’ and if not then you swipe toward ‘No.’ If any of your ‘Yes’ choices have also chosen ‘Yes’ on your photo, the app then allows you to talk to each other.
“It really takes the headache out of dating,” Mateen says of Tinder. “Before we came along, people had to get to know the person they wanted to date. They had to read profiles, write lengthy emails, and devote a lot time to the process before the first date even happened. Tinder has allowed people the freedom to meet without needing to know anything about the person you’re meeting. We’re confident Blunder will do the same for businesses.”
The Blunder app is similarly straightforward. Employers are presented with pictures of potential job applicants, along with a three directions in which their pictures can be swiped: Yes, No, and Maybe. If you swipe an applicant photo toward ‘Yes,’ they’ll receive an email notifying them that they’ve just been hired (assuming that they’ve said ‘Yes’ to you as well). A ‘No’ swipe will earn them a form letter rejection of your choosing (or a respectful silence, whichever you prefer), and a ‘Maybe’ swipe will generate a form response from the Blunder app calling you a coward for not being able to make up your mind.
“We’ve completely eliminated the need for an interview,” Mateen says. “We all know how tedious interviews are, not only for the applicant but also the interviewer. Blunder is going to save companies everywhere a ton of time.”
The official Blunder launch has been highly anticipated for months. Marcus Jinglehammer, owner of Jinglehammer Pastries and Drill Bits, was one of Blunder’s beta-testers and found the app to be enormously useful. “Before Blunder came along, I would sometimes interview half a dozen candidates for the same position. Now I just pick the first picture I like and hire whoever that happens to be. It’s really freed me up to focus on other things.”
Blunder does have its detractors, though, such as Mary Gigglesmith, an HR director for a plastics manufacturer. “How can you have any degree of certainty that you’re hiring the right person when all you have to go on is a photograph? I need to know a person’s personality, educational background, and problem-solving abilities at a minimum before I can comfortably consider hiring them.”
But Mateen is confident that people like Ms. Gigglesmith are in the minority. “That’s the old way of hiring – get to know a job candidate, ask them incisive questions, and make a reasonable decision based on as much concrete information as possible. But that takes forever. It’s way easier to hire someone who looks like they’d know what they’re doing. Besides, what would you rather do – spend a couple weeks interviewing candidates, or make a few Blunder swipes and take the rest of the day off?”
But what if the user makes a mistake? For example, what happens if an employer accidentally swipes an applicant toward ‘Yes’ when they meant to move him or her toward ‘No.’
According to Mateen, that won’t be much of an issue. “To be honest, I don’t think employers would be able to notice a mistake even if they’d made one. Job applicants are all pretty well-qualified. I mean if they weren’t, why would they even be applying? So we don’t expect this to become an actual concern.”
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