eHarmony wants you to meet your perfect … boss?

recruit employees via social media and job listing websites. But would you consider using a matching service to pair you with your ideal job? Dating website eHarmony is counting on it — and has put three years of work into making it happen. In December, eHarmony plans to launch a new company called Elevated Careers by eHarmony. Using similar algorithms as the famous “29 dimensions of compatibility” that it uses when pairing singles with their ideal partners, Elevated Careers will work to match job seekers and employers. The company aims to primarily work with employers, not just the individual job applicants. “The goal will be to help people get a job where they really belong,” said eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren. Elevated Careers “will try to identify people at eHarmony [of which there are 777,000 subscribers] who are unhappy with their job and give them a way to do something about that,” said Steve Carter, Vice President of Matching. On average, U.S. employees change jobs every 4.6 years, and a Harris Interactive study found that 29 percent of employees feel they are not appreciated in their current roles. Elevated Careers believes, with proper matching, employers will find employees that are a better fit, and employees will find more job satisfaction in a role for which they are well-suited. According to Warren, the service will involve matching based on honesty, conflict resolution, conscientiousness, and other qualities that can cross over from the dating world to the work world. However, employers need to be aware that eHarmony, at least on its dating site, does not conduct background checks on its members. When matching, your business will still need to thoroughly screen its potential employees with the help of a third-party screening service. It’s easy to maintain anonymity and misrepresent oneself online, and conducting criminal history checks, credit checks and other types of screening is still of the utmost importance. As far as its dating service, eHarmony has managed, during its 14 years of business, to maintain a divorce rate of only 3.8 percent. If it could manage the same rate of satisfaction — 96.2 percent! — within the job market, it could change the entire way employers recruit and job-seekers find work. “If we can do that for jobs, we will save companies enormous amounts of money, and save the person a lot of strain and stress too,” said Warren.]]>