3 Reasons eHarmony’s Job Matching Will Suck
Look who’s getting into the job matching game.
Popular algorithmic dating site eHarmony went mainstream last week that they have their eye on the job search marketplace.
“It seems like there’s a social problem here that needs fixing, much in the same that when we started with relationship matching, there just seemed to be a problem,” said Grant Langston, eHarmony’s vice president of customer experience.
In theory, this seems like a match (pun intended) made in heaven, but I’ll go ahead and predict disaster.
Here are three reasons eHarmony-for-jobs will flop.
1. It’s never worked before. We’ve been down this road before. The story doesn’t end well. Remember itzbig, Climber, Jobfox and Trovix? They’re all gone as matching solutions and only Trovix, a Monster acquisition, cashed out … nevermind the eventual product, 6sense, failed to round the bases.
Langston said, “We don’t see a company in the jobs market that is providing an ‘eHarmony-like’ matching service.” There’s a reason. Google it.
2. No core competency. Big companies with lots of traffic have tried to made inroads into employment for years. Remember eBay’s Kijiji or MySpace jobs? They didn’t make a dent in Craigslist.
The hubris of company’s with eyeballs and brand who think they can make a splash in recruiting never ends well. And, by the way, it reeks of desperation.
3. Recruiting isn’t dating. Motivation to fill out a 29-point questionnaire works if you’re hoping to find true love. It doesn’t work so well with employment. In order for matching to truly work, but parties - in this case, job seeker and employer - must fill out a lengthy dataset. Successful matching doesn’t occur magically, no matter what computer scientists tell you.
Only the most desperate job seekers will do it and employers don’t want to compete lengthy forms to access these candidates.
The guys at Yahoo! Finance were equally skeptical.
They’re right. Stick to the love connections and leave the employment stuff to the professionals.
Jobfox Founder Returns via Cobrain
Doostang acquired Jobfox in October last year. I interviewed the buyer’s CEO, Jeff Berger, at the time to find out more. And although he was relatively open about the purchase and what they’d do with the property, there wasn’t a lot know about the future of company founder Rob McGovern (photo).
The silence was deafening, since the new ownership was stuck dealing with some brutal allegations against Jobfox and, more interestingly, McGovern himself.
A secondary post drew a bevy of negative comments, focused on people who had delivered services to Jobfox and been stiffed on payment. One industry CEO vowed to help fund a class action suit.
Their fearless leader [Rob McGovern] managed not to pay some very large bills to a lot of people in the industry as well. Kept running them up even after it was very clear they were bankrupt. I for one would make a contribution to the legal fund of any employee who wants to sue him personally, since walking off without paying your employees as a corporate officer pierces the corporate veil in many states.
An anonymous commenter added, “Rob McGovern. This guy is just the pits. I worked with Jobfox as a Resume Writer for a LONG time. He owes me and my team LOTS of money. He is a criminal. He knowingly assigned resumes to writers, LONG AFTER he knew he would not pay them, just so he could get paid, and get out.”
About the only thing we knew was that McGovern was launching a site at www.cobrain.com, but the site was relatively barren at the time.
Visiting the site this week, however, revealed a company open for business.
The company’s mission is pretty obtuse at the moment, but all the buzzwords of the day - big data, data science and insanely great - are represented (I’m sure “pivot” will show-up eventually too).
Cobrain is about collective intelligence; the shared brain power of people like you. We’re building mobile and Web products, which will be absolutely free for consumers … Cobrain will appear in your world through various apps and software components. We’re about advanced data science and machine learning. We’ll help our members make better decisions via the collective intelligence of others.
Most notably on the company’s About page was, “The most frequent feedback we hear: ‘You’re going to change the world.’” Change the world? Certainly a piece of cake for the guy who founded CareerBuilder.
For more insight on the company’s mission, checkout their submission for a trademark here.
Joining McGover in this endeavor is CTO John Schmidt, “known in the Washington tech community as a mobile design expert,” and Jay Swearingen, chief talent officer.
The best news for McGovern, who also survived a near-death car crash in 2009, is the legal troubles of Jobfox may be over. Aside from a lot of trash talking and a 2011 suit, I can’t find evidence of anything active online.
Jobfox was acquired by Doostang today. I chat with ‘Stang CEO Jeff Berger about the deal. I was particularly interested to hear what he planned to do with the embattled brand. Enjoy.
They’re heeeeeere. Again.
Remember itzbig (see pic)? Trovix? Climber v1.0? The original Jobfox? It’s sort of like remembering your first iPod and its navigation wheel. These were the original “eHarmony for jobs” players.
Similar to the popular dating service, these solutions hoped to magically pair candidates with employers based on sophisticated algorithms.
It didn’t go too well.
Trovix, the big winner, sold to Monster for like $70 million and became 6Sense. Climber pivoted. itzbig went to Jobtarget. Jobfox is on life support.
The problem? Typical chicken and egg stuff, which is common in online classifieds. Job seekers had to fill out complicated forms and employers did likewise.
I’m not sure either got much out the time invested. Trovix, in contrast, didn’t require the same commitment, which is likely the reason they saw a payday.
This trend started around 2006 and pretty much ended with The Great Recession.
Fast forward to today, and they’re back. Only the names have changed to protect the innocent.
Heard of Path.to? Bright? Silp? These are the new kids on the job-matching block.
History tells us these startups are headed for the same eharmonious scrap heap of their forefathers. But they’re betting on an infrastructure that didn’t exist in the first generation:
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn … in other words, The Social Graph.
Maybe this will help:
It’s not a bad idea. These new services leverage - varying degrees - a candidate’s social activity and footprint in order to match them up with the right job or employer. So, let’s say you tweet a lot about HTML5, CSS3, iOS and Android. Chances are, you’re a mobile developer and thus, such jobs would come your way.
“Culture is just as important as being a good technical fit,” said Path.to CEO Darren Bounds. “The ubiquity of social networks, even niche networks like GitHub, has allowed us to tap into a new dataset - what you’re interested in, what kind of environment do you want to work, are you single, married, liquid, a recent grad?
“We know this information now. The first generation didn’t have this backbone. A big data approach to hiring can eliminate 80 percent of the work being done by humans.”
I root for companies like these. The Davids armed with a technological slingshot. A better mousetrap. Unfortunately for them, however, the current mousetraps are usually just fine for most people.
Being armed with an ever-growing social graph may not change that reality. The issue of selling employers on the idea and supplying enough job seekers to make it all worthwhile is still as prevalent today as it was in 2006.
In what may be an ominous sign for this trend, fellow matching site WorkFu added an update to their site late last month:
UPDATE 31/08/2012: We are currently in discussions regarding the possibilities of keeping WorkFu alive and will update as soon as we have more information.
A closer inspection reveals the company has called it quits. Yikes! Not a good sign for the movement. I still love a good underdog story. But this one may just turnout to be another zombie remake. But at least this version will come with Twitter chiclets.
CEO Says He’d Help Fund a Lawsuit Against Jobfox
A few weeks ago, I uncovered some information about Jobfox that seemed to indicate the company was on the skids, noting their founder had left and comments on Glassdoor about employees not getting paid.
Since that post, a few reputable contacts have come forward with insight, although nothing concrete on the future of Jobfox has surfaced.
One confidant said the end of Jobfox was way overdue, underscoring the company had stopped paying checks to them as an affiliate and had been passed to collections on other outstanding bills.
Every penny counts, and it sucks that we’ll probably not get the money that’s owed to us.
More notably, however, was the job site CEO who has been stiffed by Jobfox and said he’d be willing to help fund a lawsuit if employees filed one.
Their fearless leader [Rob McGovern] managed not to pay some very large bills to a lot of people in the industry as well. Kept running them up even after it was very clear they were bankrupt. I for one would make a contribution to the legal fund of any employee who wants to sue him personally, since walking off without paying your employees as a corporate officer pierces the corporate veil in many states.
There’s even a rumor that Jobfox is in the red to the tune of six figures for at least one vendor. Those hit hardest seem to be the vertical job search engines who added Jobfox postings - which few were actually unique to Jobfox - to their search results on a pay-per-click basis.
What’s more, the company has allegedly left their resume writers high-and-dry. According to comments left on Trademarkia, a trademark reservation service hosting Rob McGovern’s apparent new biz Cobrain:
Cobrain is owned and operated by Rob J. Mcgovern. He criminally and intentionally scammed his resume writers at jobfox, and used the money to fund Cobrain. Rob McGovern is a degenerate and should be held accountable for the more than $250K he owes the 100+ writers.
Another anonymous commenter calls McGovern a “charlatan,” saying he owes at least 50 writers more than $100,000. Adding, instead he siphoned the money to start this business. He is unethical and nobody should do business with him.”
According to the trademark, Cobrain is a coupons, rebates, price comparison information, product reviews and discount information service. Well outside the employment space.
Looks like this is one fox that’s moving on to a different chicken coop.
This is a guest post by Joel Cheesman.
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The Jobscore Blog is the official home of award-winning blogger Joel Cheesman. 