I couldn’t believe it when I first read it. Then, the disbelief faded.
HR people today have a tough job. No question. They have a mission to find the best peg to fill the currently empty hole, and fit the peg with the team and the work.
So, eHarmony saw an opportunity and jumped.
Their premise? Finding a life partner and finding the right candidate should be very similar. Both should rely on personality testing, and past experience. I’m not at all sure of that testing’s reliability. Has anyone ever seen published and verified stats from eHarmony? Well, in December 2012, eHarmony wasn’t so eHarmonious. One hundred employees were fired, the board shrank from nine to two, and an expected i.p.o. was eliminated.
Sounds like a messy divorce. Also, in 2010 according to a Harris Interactive study
“on average 542 eHarmony members get married every day in the United States. This means 98,915 couples will get married in one year. This is 4.77% of all US marriages.” – Link
When I clicked on the link (in the source) for that Harris study, it brought me back to the same page, so I can’t check it. Also, there weren’t any divorce statistics nor any crime data which I could find on this ‘dating sites reviews’ site. What is true is that they had to settle a suit over LGBT matter, and my single Jewish friends always get a “No suitable candidate found” answer after their test (which might happen to many others as well, no data on that either).
You see, this “finding the right person for the job” is a great idea. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Now, technology has the “algorithm”. Well, algorithms work fine for some things, but not for all. Humans have so many sides to their personalities that I seriously doubt any ‘test’ can actually assess them. They might assess the personality at the time of the test, but I doubt their ability to do even that, successfully or accurately. In brochures eHarmony published (misleading ones) in 2009, 148,311 marriages and 1,130,006 unmarried (LINK). This (to me) means a success rate of less than 10%.
So if their tool is used in job seeking, what’s the ‘real’ success rate going to be? A company will present a list of qualities they are looking for in a successful employee. They’ll get a list of names back. How accurate it is, and how successful the selectee will be is anyone’s guess. Whether another would have been more successful or not is anyone’s guess. It can’t be verified. It will also say nothing about whether this person will fit in with a team.
In the business world as in Medicine, it’s only human to seek an “objective and accurate” tool: People have been doing that since (and before) the Delphian Oracle (in Medicine and science those tools can be measured: None are perfect: All have good points and bad).
In that search, it might be good to note that the Delphian Oracle lived in a volcanic cave filled with hallucinogenic gasses.
That didn’t stop people from coming and offering their sacrifices back then, and it won’t today, either.
Today’s paradigm is technology.
Algorithms will be used, whether suitable or not. "Sit victimas cave": Let the victims beware.
Sources:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/career-management/eharmony-enters-the-hr-recruiting-space-should-we-be-concerned/?ftag=TRE684d531&s_cid=e101&tag=nl.e101&ttag=e101
http://www.datingsitesreviews.com/staticpages/index.php?page=eHarmony-Statistics-Facts-History
http://onlinedatingsoundbarrier.blogspot.com/2011/02/about-divorce-statistics-at-eharmony.html