T3 – @ElevatedCareers by eHarmony

This week on T3 I take a look at new careers site being developed by dating site eHarmony, called Elevated Careers. Elevated Careers was one of the new companies this year at the HR Tech Conference in the startup pavilion. While their peers in the startup pavilion didn’t really like this, Elevated is actually being run like a startup, they just have one really big investor!

Elevated has taken the successful compatibility matching technology of eHarmony that is responsible for 438 marriages per day – that’s 4% of all marriages in the U.S. per day! – and applied the same scientific methods to match employees with jobs and companies. Just as eHarmony came about because Dr. Neil Clark Warren knew there had to be a better way to finding love than just luck, Elevated believes that if jobs and employees are matched based on compatibility, people will be much more satisfied and fulfilled in their jobs, and companies will have higher rates of employee retention, motivation, engagement, and productivity.

If you’re like me, the first time I heard of Elevated Careers, I chuckled a bit. I admit, I’m sophomoric and a twelve-year-old at heart! Once I got a chance to see the product, and smart minds behind it, I was chuckling for a different reason. These folks know what they’re doing, and they have a giant captured audience to leverage. Think what you want about dating sites, but they know how to build trust, get massive amounts of data on their members and at that point is just a matter of leveraging that data.

5 Things I really like about Elevated Careers:

1. Elevated Careers gets what most career sites don’t even focus on – Fit Matters!  Their backbone is a freaking dating website; they’re going to be better at matching and fit than almost anyone!

2. eHarmony has been public about making this work. This bodes well for ensuring they’ll get the investment needed to make a great product. The UI is already very tight and intuitive. They made a very easy to use product.

3. Elevated will have a unique talent pool to leverage, that is unlike any other product on the market. You won’t be able to contact dating website members, that would kill that brand, which they have to very protective over, but you will be able to market to those members through Elevated.

4. Their fit technology will give candidates a Compatibility Score. This will help candidates know how well they will potentially fit with a potential company, but also show them where and why they fall short.

5. The job function is more than just an aggregator, as organizations will have to validate themselves before their jobs will show up in search. This way candidates know the jobs they’re applying for are current and up-to-date.

Elevated Careers is in Beta and hopes to be completely live end of first quarter of 2016, but it shouldn’t stop you from jumping on the Beta is you can get in.  One thing I wasn’t excited about is there is a piece of their product that will have candidates “buy” for certain functionality. Before you go down The Ladders path, you have to understand where they’re coming from – Dating Site.

Their data shows that people don’t value free sites.  If you offer a dating site membership for free, no one shows up. If you make them pay, add some exclusivity to it, people will pay for it.  While that works on dating sites, I don’t know if it will work on a career site, but we’ll see. I didn’t get from them that they’re married to this idea, and it might change out of beta.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

2 thoughts on “T3 – @ElevatedCareers by eHarmony

  1. Nice summary. I’ve been following eHarmony’s efforts for several years and their biggest obstacle isn’t technology but the readiness of corporations for a model that requires real transparency and equality in the decision process.

    For example- in ‘dating’ you get to ask the other person about their ‘relationships’. Employers are quick to ask candidates about their prior relationships but reluctant to divulge how many people the hiring manager actually had working for him/her and where they are now.

    eHarmony improves its algorithm by asking those who date whether they got engaged, married and, eventually if the the marriage is still working. That is truly the scientific method necessary to support a predictive analytics claim. No one is doing that today in recruiting despite all the hype.

    For these two reasons eHarmony could have disruptive value, enable better matching and elevate the selection decision processes to where they need to go in the 21st century. Full Disclosure: I have no relationship with them.

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