It’s a match unlike any other that eHarmony has done.
The veteran online dating company announced it would launch a new job-matching business called Elevated Careers by eHarmony, which is intended to match employees with businesses deemed best suited for them. Elevated Careers will incorporate the same algorithm found in its dating counterpart, though the number of measured correlations is expected to be less than the 29 variables eHarmony uses to help you find “The One.”
Neil Clark Warren, the matchmaking service’s 79-year-old founder who returned as chief executive in 2012 after a four-year retirement, first told the Business Journal in November that the Santa Monica company was looking to diversify and expand beyond the dating world.
“Last year, we spent $90 million on advertising, and we had to distribute all $90 million to one product: eHarmony,” he said. “We saw that it was hard to make a business work when you just have one product.”
Elevated Careers received no outside investment and was solely financed from revenue generated by eHarmony. A team of 10 eHarmony employees has already moved over to ready the job site for a potential December launch.
Rather than focus on small businesses with few employees, Elevated Careers hopes to attract the interest of large corporations like Walt Disney Co. or PepsiCo Inc. in its initial stages. And while Warren wouldn’t put a number on the monthly fees users would be charged, he was confident eHarmony’s 14-year history of making successful matches would quickly boost Elevated Careers’ popularity above that of other job sites like Monster or LinkedIn.
“I expect to fit on top of all those things,” he said.
Staff reporter Melissah Yang can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @MelissahYang for the latest in L.A. tech news.