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Tech

Amazon Looks To Recruit Engineers With Bizarre Tinder Ad

The internet giant has apparently started experimenting with Tinder ads looking for job candidates.
Image: Mike Seyfang/Flickr

If you're young and single, Tinder is one of the apps you likely use to look for a hookup or a long-term relationship. What you probably don't look for while swiping left and right on Tinder is for a job. But that's not stopping recruiters for looking for candidates on the dating app, even big tech companies like Amazon.

In fact, Amazon has apparently started looking for engineers on Tinder, asking them to swipe right for a chance to work on their cloud storage service Amazon Web Services. The bizarre ad has a full-fledged job posting instead of a profile pic (c'mon Amazon, why not a picture of a sexy data center?), and instead of the name of a cute girl or guy, it displays Amazononian (shouldn't it be Amazonian?).

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"This is not a Scam, we are actually from AWS Recruiting trying out this method To find top Engineering Talent [the weird capitalization is in the original ad]," the ad reads.

"Please swipe right!" the ad says, but according to our source, when he did, the app just displayed a new profile, this one of a real person.

"I guess I wasn't good enough to even get a date, or a job," said security expert and hacker Bryan Seely, who sent the screenshot to Motherboard.

It's unclear if this ad comes directly from Amazon or from a recruitment agency, or where exactly it's being displayed, if it's geo-targeted. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But an email included in the ad "SeattleJobs@amazon.com," appears to be real, according to a service that checks whether email addresses exist.

I'm not sure how others feel, but I'd be pretty annoyed by an ad like this, sliding into my Tindering sessions. It's like a recruiter stepping up to me at a crowded bar while I'm looking to strike a conversation with a cute girl. But who knows, maybe that will become normal in the future, just like ads have become routine on other social network like Facebook or Twitter.