On Hinge, you sell yourself to potential partners. You’re 5’11” (give or take two or three inches), a Taurus, vaccinated, looking for a short-term relationship, open to long-term. 

On LinkedIn, you sell yourself to potential employers. You’re an undergraduate student at USC, president of X student organization, incoming summer analyst at X bank, #OpenToWork. 

With these carefully crafted profiles designed to attract attention at first glance — whether from a hiring manager or a prospective hookup — we become defined by a collection of arbitrary labels, punchy statements and a selfie or two.

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In the face of online dating and job hunting, it’s difficult to entirely avoid creating some sort of public persona, and it seems even harder not to feel commodified when you’re constantly viewing yourself from a third-party perspective.

When I was in the trenches of Hinge (which I have since escaped, thank God), the process of selecting my best photos and coming up with short, witty answers to prompts was initially somewhat fun — but it quickly felt a little dehumanizing. I fixated on minuscule details of my pictures, imagining what parts of me another person might perceive to decide if I was worthy of a match.

Due to the nature of these dating apps, we see users less as people and more as data points. Benson Zhou, an assistant professor who studies sexuality and digital media at New York University Shanghai, noted that physical appearance and quantifiable characteristics like height are visually prioritized on dating profiles. 

“The person is not that concrete,” Zhou said in an interview with CNN. “They’re reflected through numbers … That’s what they want to direct the user’s attention to, and that’s what is prioritized.”

Whether it’s on apps like Hinge or networking platforms like LinkedIn or Handshake, you’re able to offer so much information about yourself on your profile — yet reveal so little substance. Users are bound to character limits in profile bios or work experience descriptions, which encourage careful curation but limit authentic expression. 

A research study titled “Profiling the Self in Mobile Online Dating Apps: a Serial Picture Analysis” analyzed 524 dating app profile pictures. The article, published in the National Library of Medicine, found that users’ photos tended to lean toward conformity instead of uniqueness. 

“Subjects seem rather to strive for being easy to categorize and decide on within seconds … than presenting the self as different, unique or challenging,” the article stated.

The way we craft our profiles on LinkedIn is slightly different, but similarly creates a phenomenon of carefully creating the most desirable (see: hirable) rather than authentic versions of ourselves. 

Unlike what the research study found about dating apps inadvertently encouraging conformity, LinkedIn users are often encouraged to build a more unique “personal brand” on their professional profiles to strengthen visibility and credibility for employers. 

Harvard Business Review, for example, recommends deciding what “key personal brand attributes” you want to highlight to show companies that you’re aligned with their values and mission. The goal is to outwardly represent the traits you hope to portray. 

In digital professional spaces like LinkedIn, I see the value in learning how to market yourself well to maximize your chances of securing interviews and job offers. Crafting your “personal brand” may be somewhat necessary for networking and professional development purposes — but if you start tying your self-worth to how impressive or attractive you seem to others, it will harm your sense of identity. 

Figuring out how to present the best version of yourself publicly while also avoiding the unhealthy consequences of self-commodification is a hard balance to strike. However, I don’t believe crafting these online personas through profiles is an inherently bad thing — you just need to be clear on the purpose behind each profile. 

To reference Walt Whitman, we contain multitudes. The different sides of yourself can include you as a romantic partner or you as a valuable employee. If you set expectations for yourself on which profiles are purely for professional purposes to secure a job and which are purely to find a potential partner, you can find a healthy separation between the personas you craft and the person you are.