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Comment by sir_bearington | Hacker News Reader

If one of those goth girls Bob is into ends up matching with him, he can still go out with her even if several of the other 95 women match with him.

If some of the low quality companies respond to you, you can always turn them down in favor of the companies you're most interested in if they respond.

I'm not sure what I'm failing to explain. It's strictly better to do a broader search. Save for the time it takes to apply. But in the case of both online dating and applying to jobs it's not that much work to apply even with a customized cover letter. You're selecting from the subset of people who respond to your initial application - or swipe. The more applications you send the bigger this subset will be.

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You are explaining your point well. You would be happy with any of the 100. In that case your strategy of swipe all makes sense.

But if you want to increase your successful swipe % rate within a target group a different strategy of profile management is in order.

I believe the targeted approach is more successful for repeated interactions and perhaps a relationship where the swipe all approach would get higher numbers with more low quality matches.

The job conversation is a bigger discussion. Spending a day on a cover letter, custom sample application, researching history and changing your resume to fit each job takes time but also provides a lot of value when trying to form a connection in the interview.

Sure, if narrowing the set of people you accept increases your match rate this strategy makes sense. But it's not the case in most online dating. The subset of people you're interested in are individuals, who all have different tastes. You can't show different profiles to different people, so a targeted approach is not feasible. Those 5 goth girls Bob is interested in like different types of men.

Likewise, spending a day on crafting a cover letter and resume is a waste of time. A customized cover letter and resume probably takes 15-30 minutes, tops. Why are you worried about forming a connection in an interview when you don't even have an interview yet? Spend a day researching the company in depth once you have an interview scheduled.

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