Superficial or Science? Dating Sites Converting to Recruiting Sites
I was recently researching the field of work-force science. This field of study is where HR meets big data and puts it to work. The point of this research is to create profiles of candidates and use scientific research to find where they are best placed. If you ever took a career assessment test in high school, that would be a crude and simplistic type of work-force science. These researchers are making recruiting less of a guessing game and more of a science, but dating sites have added a twist—a pretty twist.
Dating sites beat recruiters to the punch when it comes to using big data and more complete profiles to properly match people. Now they’re taking that science over to the recruiting world.
As I was trolling articles, I ran into a piece from the NY Times that said eHarmony, “Announced in January that it would retool its algorithm for romance so it could examine employee-employer relationships, and enter the talent search business later this year.” eHarmony will retool their research and methods to match people for employment rather than love. eHarmony boasts about 20 million users, that’s a surprising ½ of all online daters using their service, and 17 percent of marriages last year were a result of an online dating site match. They must be doing something right. There must be some validity to this method. eHarmony’s VP of customer experience said,
“When people meet in a bar they evaluate these four to five superficial data points—is the other person attractive, are they a good conservationist, what’s their job, what’s their socioeconomic status—and then decide whether or not to ride off into the sunset. This is the same thing that’s happening in the hiring world: employers just evaluate these typical four to five superficial traits and make their hire.”
This seem so, well…superficial . On the flip side of that coin, we’re learning more and more everyday that soft skills will trump hard skills almost every time. It might be easy to find someone who can and will do the work, but it’s not so easy to find someone who can and will do the work thatalsofits into the company culture.
eHarmony isn’t the only dating site trying its hand at recruiting. BeautifulPeople.com, once just a dating site for “beautiful people”, launched a recruiting site last year. BeautifulPeople is an exclusive dating site where members vote on the attractiveness of those applying to join the site. If they’re hot enough, they can join; if they are deemed not good looking enough, they are unable to join. As site visitors click the “Recruit Beautiful Employee” button, they are directed to a page that says,
“Numerous studies have shown that consumers tend to respond more positively and are more receptive to attractive people. If your company specializes in sales, is in the service industry, or has regular face to face interaction with customers – first impressions are all important.”
As dating sites take their place in the recruiting world, we do have to wonder about the effects. Is this a step in the wrong direction under the guise of science? Yes, eHarmony will actually be using scientific data to match employees and employers, but will this put more of an emphasis on the superficial at the same time? Are we moving too far away from hard skills?