Without a doubt, creating a profile is one of the most difficult and annoying things about using a dating app. Finding one or two decent photos is hard enough, especially when you grew up in the pre-selfie era having never learned how to take a decent one (hands up millennials). But then Hinge comes along and wants six of them just to even get you started. SIX?! A message to Hinge, we love you, but bro...?

Left to our own devices, we usually end up with a hodge-podge of photos kindly suggested to us by our bestie Mr Zuckerberg over at Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, Mr Z is good at a lot of things and he knows ALOT about you, but I’m not convinced you want him choosing your profile photos.

So, what are your other options? Well, you can always ask your Mum. I’m sure she’s got some lovely family shots she thinks would be perfectly suitable. Or, if you really want to self-sabotage, ask your sister. She’ll definitely come up with something to fill those six spots. Thinking about it now, Facebook’s suggestions don’t seem so bad after all…

OK, you’ve got your photos, you’ve painstakingly answered the Hinge prompts and you’re as happy as you’re going to be with your profile. You send it off out into the world and wait for it to get you a date.

Here’s some news for you. Just like your resume isn’t designed to get you a job, your dating profile isn’t designed to get you a date.

The purpose of a resume is to get you an interview.
The purpose of a dating profile is to get you a MATCH.

In the same way the interview (hopefully) gets you the job offer, the match (hopefully) gets you the date. Once you’ve got a suitable match from your awesome profile, getting the date is up to you. That’s where your chat skills come in.

Why do you need to know this? Because people, most of us are over-sharing! You don’t need to show every aspect of your life or your personality, every hobby you have or every country you’ve traveled to in your profile. You wouldn’t put every detail of this in your resume, but you would chat about it in your job interview. Same goes here. Save some stuff for later. Have enough in your profile that gets a conversation going, but not so much that you’ve got nothing to chat about when you match. There’s nothing that kills a match quicker than a dead-end conversation. OK well maybe one of those unsolicited pics I’ve heard about, but I hope none of you would send those… would you?


Need help making a match-winning profile, download Swipemate from your favourite app store.