Melissa O’Neil’s first job was working the front desk for a dating service, but this was before the days of sites like eHarmony or Match.com

“Back in the day before the internet, they would actually take videos of people doing all the things they do in the online forms now,” O’Neil says.

According to O’Neil, sometimes customers’ dating videos had outtakes.

“The guys very much got in trouble and had to be edited for saying things about what they were looking for … and women were more on the side of saying things about themselves that they shouldn’t have said.”

But O’Neil says she was able to learn something from the mistakes of all those video daters looking for love.

“Seeing how people presented themselves and the kind of things they could do that would shoot themselves in the foot taught me a lot about how to present myself – obviously in the dating world – but more specifically in the work world,” says O’Neil.