I love Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. He gets to do some of the dirtiest, and often interesting jobs on the planet for a single day.
I sit in front of my computer 10 hours a day drinking coffee, participating in conference calls on Skype and doing client work. Sometimes I’d like to get out of the office and see what other people are doing to bring home the bacon instead of figuring out how to build a floating hot tub in SecondLife on my lunch hour.
Dating Industry Jobs I’d like to have for a day:
SQL Server Reporting Analyst at Match.com. Sitting in a cubicle next to the Customer Service holding pen listening to reps while they attempt to upsell churning members private matchmaking services or just one more month while gorging on reams of data emanating from the Match datacenters. Pinch me. I think everyone in the dating industry should be forced to do this, because it scares me how little most dating executives know about their customers and the user experience on their sites.
Systems Analyst & Statistician at Yahoo: Similar to the Match gig but in Silicon Valley working in close proximity to some of the smartest people in the planet, the ocean and amazing scenery.
Design Researcher at Yahoo Personals: Plan, design, and conduct high quality design research throughout the product development process, including ethnographies, diary studies, competitive evaluations, iterative prototype studies, participatory design sessions, usability studies, benchmark studies, and similar methods.
When I started ProfileDoctor I sat down on the beach one summer and read 2,500 personal ads. That exercise and many phone and in person interviews taught me more than anything else about the mind of online daters. As research director at a boutique management consulting firm in a past life, I spent a lot of time getting people to tell me things they didn’t know they knew or didn’t want to tell me. that skill proved invaluable when trying to figure out what singles need, as opposed to what they think they want.
Being able to do this type of research at Match or Yahoo would be super cool. My concern is that both companies are too big to make too many necessary changes. Legions of sacred cows that need constant care and feeding. More about turning the dials and pulling the levers a fraction of an inch after a conference call with corporate to make sure it doesn’t affect the day’s stock price.
That said, It would be incredible to be thrown in the bullpen with either company, mix things up a bit and do some bottom-up interviews to see what the disjoint is between what both companies are doing and what employees think they should be doing. Get rid of the broken legacy features, mindset and the people that propagate them, then designing and developing innovative services that reflect the new crop of online daters, which is quite different from the boomlet singles from a few years ago if anyone hasn’t noticed.
According to the list of dating industry jobs at Indeed.com, it looks like Yahoo! Personals is actually gearing up to do a redesign. But who’s running the show there? They are currently seeking a new Senior Interaction Designer, Director of Product Marketing, Senior Product Manager and Visual Designer. They should add “must be a self starter” to the resumes.
Technorati Tags: dream+jobs
