Earlier this year, eHarmony, the dating website, announced a curious line extension: it had begun work on a job-recruiting service to debut sometime in 2014. Initial reactions ranged from skepticism to outright sarcasm. Would HR managers hold out rose bouquets at interviews? Would "long walks on the beach" displace "efficient multitasking" as the résumé pablum du jour? What did hiring have to do with dating, anyway?
Well, quite a lot, actually. To people with deep knowledge of the hiring and dating markets, it's not a stretch. After all, both involve long, costly search processes. Both involve agents with complex sets of criteria on either side. And though money can play a role, it's not the central factor in dating or in hiring.
The companies applying matchmaking algorithms to job recruitment are yet another case of a disruptive technology shattering the status quo. Hiring is a expensive process, which is why it's a $400 billion global industry. In the upstarts' view, it's being approached from the wrong direction: soft skills and "cultural fit" can be better predictors of a good hire than education and experience.
Whether you're trying to find a mate or a systems engineer, the process is complicated. In economics, it's called a two-sided matching problem, and for decades, economists have considered dating and hiring so similar as to be roughly synonymous. "When I write out an economic model," says Utku Ünver, a market-design economist at Boston College, "sometimes I call [the variables] man and woman, and sometimes I call them firm and worker."
Perhaps the most salient common feature of the dating and hiring markets right now is how broken they are. Each suffers from its own grim failure rate: divorce for lovers, churn for workers. The divorce rate is estimated to be about 45%, higher if unofficial separations are included. Though the weak job market has lowered churn, as recently as 2007 about 3 million workers were voluntarily leaving their jobs each month. Today, fully 70% are said to be dissatisfied in their jobs. Both markets are wildly inefficient and plagued by discredited notions of what creates enduring matches to begin with.
Can technology create an efficient market in sectors where "soft" human factors are so much in play? In the dating world, eHarmony believes it already has. The company was founded more than a decade ago by a marriage counselor who concluded that many couples rush into matrimony over superficial matters--physical attraction and shared interests, say--while ignoring the deeper factors that create long-term stability.