Candidate.Guru makes a match
Company acquires eHarmony software
Boca Raton-based Candidate.Guru, which helps employers identify the bestfitting candidates for their company’s culture, has acquired Los Angeles-based Elevated Careers’ employee engagement software from dating site eHarmony.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
“This will enable Candidate.Guru to significantly accelerate our revenue plan,” said Chris Daniels, co-founder of Candidate.Guru. The company is a startup that is part of Florida Atlantic University’s Tech Runway. Daniels said the acquisition opens the door to an employee engagement market that exceeds $3 billion.
“It would have taken us years to build this,” Daniels said, referring to the eHarmony software.
Daniels said Elevated Career’s technology is a perfect match to what Candidate.Guru has already developed to predict cultural fits between job candidates and companies.
An employer uses Candidate.Guru’s software to narrow down a large pool of candidates to 10 or so people who potentially are a good fit with a company, Daniels said. But Elevated Careers can provide a deeper analysis of those selected candidates, he said.
Elevated Careers’ data scientists developed a compatibility matching system based on assessments of workers’ personalities and values, and of companies’ cultures. The software can analyze a job candidate’s skills and background for a specific job, measure how an individual’s work skills fit within a company’s culture, and examine interpersonal work relationships to check compatibility between the job candidate and a certain manager.
The acquired software also can be used to measure employee engagement, which is critical today for employee retention, Daniels said. “It's incredibly important because people have lots of other job opportunities in a tight job market.”
He said Candidate.Guru also will have access to academic and scientific research on employee engagement by Steve Carter, former chief scientist for eHarmony.
Grant Langston, CEO of eHarmony, said he was happy that Candidate.Guru “is going to continue on this important mission we started three years ago.”
eHarmony put up Elevated Careers for sale earlier this year, citing eHarmony’s lack of experience in the human resources technology market, according to industry publications for the Society for Human Resource Management and Recruiting Daily.
Candidate.Guru was founded in 2014. The company doubled its revenue from 2015 to 2016, Daniels said. Candidate.Guru has raised nearly $2 million through two rounds of funding led by The Fan Fund, an Orlando-based, early-stage fund that invests in technology and life science companies, and previous angel funding.