When I worked at Facebook, the Workplace analytics team had a cool tradition: The team’s weekly meetings always started with a small data quiz.

The winner of the previous week’s competition would prepare a question about the product’s key metrics. For example, “what was last month’s MAU?” or “how many new users joined last week?” or “what proportion of the new companies reach 10 users?” or “what was last month’s revenue?” The question had one requirement: Its answer had to be found on the team’s dashboard.

The participants were to write down the answer without getting help from computers, which meant we could only use our memory to do so. The person whose answer was closest to the correct number got +1 point in the chart, and the person who was the farthest lost 1 point. Every six months, a winner was chosen and the game started again.

Even with a stellar team, chock-full of strong expertise, it’s hard to create a long-lasting company. The tenacious workers that make it through the initial challenges of forming a company face the complicated task of aligning the company towards a common goal that seems ever-changing (in a competitive and fickle landscape).

Do you ever wonder how successful companies continue to navigate and grow? I often wondered how the companies I admired knew what direction to go — and it became apparent that the trick was being almost irresponsibly aggressive in growing key objectives with a talented group of people.

Tinder and its parent company Match Group have weathered the COVID-19 pandemic relatively well, all things considered. User engagement is up, as is interest around new product features, like video calls. More than six years after its launch, Tinder is finally introducing a one-on-one video calling feature that it says will be heavily moderated for content and safety. At the same time, Tinder CEO Elie Seidman says he and his team are focusing on how to keep young people coming to the app and how they can build digital relationships inside of it, especially as in-person dates slow down.

More than 25 million Americans were laid off in April, and that’s just the official count. Unofficially, some economists estimate that more than 52 percent of Americans under the age of 45 have lost jobs, hours, or been furloughed. The unemployment rate could eventually top 30 percent. That means everyone—from lawyers to waiters, software engineers to carpenters to marketers—will be affected.
Clearly, these are not normal times. So we can’t rely on the “normal” tools we’ve previously used to help people find work: the LinkedIn and Craigslist searches, coffee chats, recruiters, staffing agencies, and so on. Those methods can’t hit the speed, scale, and placement quality that companies or candidates will need coming out of this crisis. But verticalized jobs marketplaces—platforms that focus on one industry, role, candidate type, or demographic—can and will. Now is the time to be building them.