Does Your Career Need Its Own Tinder Account?

Thanks to Weave, wiping to the right can get you a gig?

Your next swipe to the right might be the beginning of a different type of working relationship. A new app called Weave takes the idea that made Tinder a phenomenon and runs with it—in the direction of the office. Yes, it’s easy to mock, but it actually works.

Available for iPhone and Android, Weave connects to your LinkedIn profile rather than your Facebook account and, like Tinder, shows you professionally relevant people in your vicinity. Find someone you’d like to grab coffee with and swipe to the right. For people you’re not interested in—you guessed it—you swipe to the left. If the business associate of your dreams swipes right on your profile as well, you’ll be matched up and given a private chat channel within the app to coordinate a meetup. Don’t send dick pics.

Founder and CEO Brian Ma says that the app is currently responsible for around 100 coffee meetings every day. “There’s about 600, 700 matches a day, of which roughly one sixth turn into a meeting,” says Ma. “There’s a ton of success stories. People have definitely gotten jobs; people have gotten funding. Press use it to write cool articles about entrepreneurs, and consultants have sold workshop sales and tickets. It’s literally the entire gambit of business connections.”

Ma even found investors through the app and plans to use it for hiring as well.

The app was born out of Ma’s own frustration with networking events. Making meaningful connections with people at events is often difficult, and asking for intros from friends can get spammy pretty quick. Weave is different in that you’ll only end up talking with people who have also expressed interest in chatting with you. Since they’re business connections, Ma says most meetings are scheduled for a week or so later rather than right then.

“It’s so easy. We’re finding engineers are using it. Designers are using it. People you don’t typically see at networking events use it,” he says. “You can literally just sit in your office, or sit at a bus stop, or a toilet, or whatever, and in five minutes you can make a meeting with someone you want to meet.”

Just don’t mistake it for Tinder when you’re out on the town. Not every opportunity is that sort of opportunity.

Photos by Philip Lee Harvey / Corbis

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