A Killer Golf Swing Is a Hot Job Skill Now

Standout golfers who aren’t quite PGA Tour material now have somewhere else to play professionally: Corporate America.

People who can smash 300-yard drives and sink birdie putts are sought-after hires in finance, consulting, sales and other industries, recruiters say. In the hybrid work era, the business golf outing is back in a big way.

Executive recruiter Shawn Cole says he gets so many requests to find ace golfers that he records candidates’ handicaps, an index based on average number of strokes over par, in the information packets he submits to clients. Golf alone can’t get you a plum job, he says—but not playing could cost you one.

“I know a guy that literally flies around the world in a private jet loaded with French wine, and he golfs and lands hundred-million-dollar deals,” Cole says.

Tee times and networking sessions have long gone hand-in-golf-glove. Despite criticism that doing business on the course undermines diversity, equity and inclusion efforts—and the fact that golf clubs haven’t always been open to women and minorities —people who mix golf and work say the outings are one of the last reprieves from 30-minute calendar blocks

Stars like Tiger Woods and Michelle Wie West helped expand participation in the sport. Still, just 22% of golfers are nonwhite and 26% are women, according to the National Golf Foundation.

To lure more people, clubs have relaxed rules against mobile-phone use on the course, embracing white-collar professionals who want to entertain clients on the links without disconnecting from the office. It’s no longer taboo to check email from your cart or take a quick call at the halfway turn.

With so much other business conducted virtually, shaking hands on the green and schmoozing over clubhouse beers is now seen as making an extra effort, not slacking off.

Americans played a record 531 million rounds last year. Weekday play has nearly doubled since 2019, with much of the action during business hours , according to research by Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom .

“It would’ve been scandalous in 2019 to be having multiple meetings a week on the golf course,” Bloom says. “In 2024, if you’re producing results, no one’s going to see anything wrong with it.”

A financial adviser at a major Wall Street bank who competes on the amateur circuit told me he completes 90% of his tasks by 10 a.m. because he manages long-term investment plans that change infrequently. The rest of his workday often involves golfing with clients and prospects. He’s a member of a private club with a multiyear waiting list, and people jump at the chance to join him on a course they normally can’t access.

There is an art to bringing in business this way. He never initiates shoptalk, telling his playing partners the round is about having fun and getting to know each other. They can’t resist asking about investment strategies by the back nine, he says.

Work hard, play hard

Matt Parziale golfed professionally on minor-league tours for several years, but when his dream of making the big time ended, he had to get a regular job. He became a firefighter, like his dad.

A few years later he won one of the biggest amateur tournaments in the country, earning spots in the 2018 Masters and U.S. Open, where he tied for first among non-pros.

The brush with celebrity brought introductions to business types that Parziale, 35 years old, says he wouldn’t have met otherwise. One connection led to a job with a large insurance broker. In 2022 he jumped to Deland, Gibson Insurance Associates in Wellesley, Mass., which recognised his golf game as a tool to help win large accounts.

He rescheduled our interview because he was hosting clients at a private club on Cape Cod, and squeezed me in the next morning, before teeing off with a business group in Newport, R.I.

A short time ago, Parziale couldn’t imagine making a living this way. Now he’s the norm in elite amateur golf circles.

“I look around at the guys at the events I play, and they all have these jobs ,” he says.

His boss, Chief Executive Chip Gibson, says Parziale is good at bringing in business because he puts as much effort into building relationships as honing his game. A golf outing is merely an opportunity to build trust that can eventually lead to a deal, and it’s a misconception that people who golf during work hours don’t work hard, he says.

Barry Allison’s single-digit handicap is an asset in his role as a management consultant at Accenture , where he specialises in travel and hospitality. He splits time between Washington, D.C., and The Villages, Fla., a golf mecca that boasts more than 50 courses.

It can be hard to get to know people in distributed work environments, he says. Go golfing and you’ll learn a lot about someone’s temperament—especially after a bad shot.

“If you see a guy snap a club over his knee, you don’t know what he’s going to snap next,” Allison says.

Special access

On a recent afternoon I was a lunch guest at Brae Burn Country Club, a private enclave outside Boston that was the site of U.S. Golf Association championships won by legends like Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones. I parked in the second lot because the first one was full—on a Wednesday.

My host was Cullen Onstott, managing director of the Onstott Group executive search firm and a former collegiate golfer at Fairfield University. He explained one reason companies prize excellent golfers is they can put well-practiced swings on autopilot and devote most of their attention to chitchat.

It’s hard to talk with potential customers about their needs and interests when you’re hunting for errant shots in the woods. It’s also challenging if you show off.

The first hole at Brae Burn is a 318-yard par 4 that slopes down, enabling big hitters like Onstott to reach the putting green in a single stroke. But to stay close to his playing partners and keep the conversation flowing, he sometimes hits a shorter shot.

Having an “in” at an exclusive club can make you a catch. Bo Burch, an executive recruiter in North Carolina, says clubs in his region tend to attract members according to their business sectors. One might be chock-full of real-estate investors while another has potential buyers of industrial manufacturing equipment.

Burch looks for candidates who are members of clubs that align with his clients’ industries, though he stresses that business acumen comes first when filling positions.

Tami McQueen, a former Division I tennis player and current chief marketing officer at Atlanta investment firm BIP Capital, signed up for private golf lessons this year. She had noticed colleagues were wearing polos with course logos and bringing their clubs to work. She wanted in.

McQueen joined business associates on the golf course for the first time in March at the PGA National Resort in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. She has lowered her handicap to a respectable 26 and says her new skill lends a professional edge.

“To be able to say, ‘I can play with you and we can have those business meetings on the course’ definitely opens a lot more doors,” she says.

As online-dating apps court new and younger audiences, some of their marketing efforts are turning off daters instead.

Bumble last month apologised for ads making light of women so frustrated with online dating that they would consider celibacy. The League, a dating app targeting “the overly ambitious,” was called “ick-inducing” for its recent ad campaign, which included taglines like “Date someone with a 5-year-plan that makes you want to ovulate.” And Hinge’s years-long “Designed to Be Deleted” campaign has started to fall flat for longtime users still looking for love on their phones.

Online dating continues to play a lead role in the romantic lives of millions of Americans. Around half of all U.S. adults under 30 have used a dating site or app at some point in their lives, and one in 10 adults with partners say they met their significant other by dating online, according to Pew Research Center data. And the industry’s biggest players, Match Group and Bumble, now generate annual revenues north of $3.4 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively.

But the ad campaigns have high stakes for online dating companies trying to achieve the right mix of user acquisition and pricing power to re-interest Wall Street in a saturated sector.

Online-dating growth has been slowing. Paying users declined 6% in the first quarter of the year at Match Group, whose portfolio includes the League, Tinder and Hinge, compared with a 3% dip in the first quarter of 2023. The Bumble app grew paying users 18% in the first quarter, compared with 31% growth in the period a year earlier.

Shares in both have fallen this year even as the S&P 500 rose. And some singles have become perhaps as wary as investors.

Nearly half of all online daters and more than half of female daters say their experiences have been negative, according to Pew , and a growing tide of users are sharing their dissatisfaction in popular Facebook forums and on TikTok. People bemoan a perceived rise in bad dating etiquette such as “ghosting” and the sending of unsolicited sexual messages, and blame the way online romance makes it easier to discard potential partners at a touch of a button. “Hacks,” or tricks designed to game the apps for better dates, abound, demonstrating the shortcomings of their designs.

And the companies’ growing emphasis on pricier premium services is giving users new reasons to scrutinise the algorithmically driven path to romance.

Bumble made its name as a free app that only let women make the first move, for example. But since 2016, it has charged for advantages such as unlimited “swipes” to connect with prospects. The most expensive plan today costs $80 a month. Nonpaying users on Bumble and other apps can hit a limit, which some say leaves them taunted by the nagging fear that their perfect partners are hidden just on the other side of a paywall.

In this environment, new ad campaigns have become a release valve for the tension.

Lidiane Jones, CEO, Bumble, at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival in New York on May 21. PHOTO: GARY HE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Failure to launch

Bumble users had hoped change was on the way after a teaser campaign depicted a discouraged dater joining a convent but happily leaving after being handed the Bumble app. “We’ve changed so you don’t have to,” one of the ads promised.

“At this point, it’s the app’s responsibility not to rebrand, but to pivot technologically,” said Michelle Khouri , the founder of creator platform Recordical , who has been using dating apps on and off for 10 years following her divorce from a man she met through online dating service eHarmony.

But Bumble’s big move wasn’t a fundamental overhaul: The company was letting women put questions on their profiles to which men they matched with could respond without a specific invitation.

Disappointment became backlash when the full ad campaign included billboards that declared, “Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun” and “You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer.”

Female daters often thinly disguise their dissatisfaction with modern dating by joking about giving it up for a life of spinsterhood, and Bumble had done what all marketers try to do—joined the conversation .

The problem for many was that Bumble’s quips about nunneries located the problem in daters’ resilience, as opposed to the dating apps themselves, and the unfavourable dating culture some users say the apps’ owners have been complicit in fuelling.

“Bumble was a brand that built its identity on empowering women and then they absolutely laughed in our faces,” said Michelle Wintersteen, the founder and chief executive of branding and marketing agency MKW Creative and a former Bumble user who grew frustrated by its paywalls.

Bumble took down the billboards and made several public apologies.

“We just made a mistake in how that landed. It was not good and we felt really terrible about it,” Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones said at a Wall Street Journal event last month.

Jones added in an emailed statement that the company is enhancing its internal and external review processes, and “actively engaging in conversations to ensure our marketing tone matches the 10 years Bumble has dedicated to championing women and creating safe, respectful, and empowering spaces for connection.”

Some online-dating executives and observers think the gripes with dating apps are largely an extension of age-old ennui over the search for lasting love.

“This is not a new phenomenon, and I think that dating apps have crystallised and brought those concerns to the fore, primarily because the prior institutions that were responsible for connecting individuals—such as family, friends, churches, other homes of worship—were not able to assume blame in the same way,” said Jess Carbino, a sociologist who has worked as a consultant for Bumble and Tinder.

Pickup lines

When the League introduced its “Be a GoalDigger” brand campaign in 2023, its first big marketing effort since being acquired by Match Group in 2022, some had visceral reactions.

“Whoever is behind this truly thought they were like, hitting Gen -Z, being super edgy and cool,” said the TikTok user who reported getting the “ick” from its campaign. “In reality, it is the most millennial, cringy thing that makes you want to actually convulse.”

The app has “never been afraid of speaking up or speaking out about the kind of people that The League attracts,” said Lisa Kraynak, senior vice president of marketing for the League, in a statement. In addition to its ad mentioning ovulation, others read: “Find Your Goal Mate” and “Date Someone With Big Goal Energy.”

“We know that we aren’t for everyone, and that is a core part of our value proposition,” Kraynak added, noting that a number of people responded well to it.

Unlike apps such as Tinder and Bumble, the League requires profile approval to join. On the app, users get three to five prospects a day unless they upgrade to become a paying member, which runs $99 a week or $399 for a three-month subscription. Once a match is made in the app, users have 14 days to initiate a conversation before the matches expire.

Fighting flakes

These components, as well as features such as a “flakiness score” indicating which users have a habit of matching but not chatting, are why Kraynak said the League is “designed to combat the dissatisfaction with apps today .”

Tinder has leaned away from the celebration of singledom that it embraced in a 2018 brand campaign that called single “a terrible thing to waste.” While the app has long been associated with hookups, the company has more recently emphasised the various relationships that can result from its app. Its marketing now romanticizes “a toothbrush at their place” and “comfortable silences,” all while it seeks to upsell users.

“It was about shedding a perception that was too narrow and not accurate,” said Melissa Hobley, chief marketing officer at Tinder.

Hinge, the Match Group brand that has long positioned itself as an app for finding relationships rather than hookups, continues to iterate on its “Designed to Be Deleted” campaign launched in 2019. The company has refreshed the campaign every year since then with the same tagline.

On social media, some dissatisfied users say they have deleted the app—not because they found love but because the app didn’t work for them. Hinge said every feature is designed to help daters be intentional and that it is looking for ways to address dating burnout.

Chief Marketing Officer Jackie Jantos said Hinge is the fastest-growing major dating app.

“‘Designed to Be Deleted,’ as an idea and a marketing program, continues to help us build our base of users,” Jantos said.

Match Group said Hinge’s direct revenue grew 50% in the first quarter of the year as paying members increased 31% and revenue per payer rose 14%. It offers two types of subscriptions, Hinge+ and HingeX, which start at $14.99 and $24.99, respectively, a week.

More recently, the company partnered with a social-media brand that interviews couples on the street, to circulate their love stories that involve Hinge.

“We know that our best growth comes from organic success stories of people meeting on Hinge,” added Jantos.