Facilitating a labor of love
Online dating firm EHarmony adds a service that tries to match people to jobs.
For EHarmony, matchmaking is no longer only about love.
After 15 years in the romance business, EHarmony is now trying to match people to jobs, based on skills, values and personality. The new Elevated Careers website launched at an event last week at EHarmony’s Westwood headquarters, with the goal of doubling the average employee’s tenure at one spot to nearly 10 years.
Dan Erickson, who’s leading the effort, said Elevated Careers kick- starts a potential second act for EHarmony. His company could one day facilitate relationships of all kinds — say, those between patients and medical providers.
“Nothing’s more important to EHarmony than relationships,” Erickson said.
Privately held EHarmony doesn’t disclose financial details. In the early 2000s, Silicon Valley investors Sequoia Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures got the company going with more than $ 100 million, but EHarmony declined to name current shareholders. It considered going public several years ago until it experienced slowing user signups and executive turnover.
Now, the $ 4- billion online dating industry is being squeezed by upstarts like Tinder, OkCupid and other apps in the Match. com group, which went public last year. Erickson said EHarmony is “healthy” after layoffs and restructuring. But entering the jobs market — an industry 20 times larger than the dating mar-
ket — could quickly redefine the company’s prospects.
“It’s important to not rest on your laurels,” Erickson said.
He f irst pitched EHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren about a jobs service in 2008 when both of them were living in Maine. Warren stuffed Erickson’s presentation in his briefcase and didn’t take a second look until he took over as chief executive in 2012. He called Erickson, giving him a week to decide whether he wanted to develop EHarmony for jobs.
It was an easy decision for Erickson, who hadn’t taken the idea elsewhere because he considered EHarmony best suited for it. Nine of EHarmony’s 220 employees now work exclusively on Elevated Careers.
Getting people into the right jobs could boost the company’s romantic success rate too. Warren, who tells his grandchildren to f ind a steady job before thinking about marriage, said the estimated 4% divorce rate among the more than 2 million EHarmony marriages could be reduced by addressing couples’ dysfunctional work situations.
Job seekers can use Elevated Careers for free, beginning by submitting their resume and answering questions about their current and ideal workplaces.
The surveys yield not only a personalized list of open jobs, but also a score card that shows how much users enjoy their current job. The system f inds matches by referencing the aggregate score of everyone at a candidate- seeking company.
Companies can purchase a report based on the surveys or pay a recurring fee to list openings. The subscription could run around $ 1,000 annually for a 25- employee f irm. Early users include AT& T, HomeAway and American Airlines.
Elevated Careers will test how much credibility the company has built up after “well over $ 1 billion” in advertising throughout the years, Warren said.
“If we can extend our brand pull to a much larger business, we think we’ll be in a much better position,” Warren said.
Second acts abound
EHarmony is among a handful of large Los Angeles tech companies that survived the downturn in the economy after 2001 without merging or being acquired. It and the others, including United Online, Edmunds and Boingo Wireless, have also spent the last couple of years turning to new offices, new policies or new products to stave off decline as competition heightens for consumers and tech workers.
The results have been mixed, though.
Edmunds, the car- buying online resource, said last year it’s been better able to attract and retain employees because of initiatives to replace boring performance reviews with fun training. Last year at the f irm’s Santa Monica headquarters, employees who were experts in skills such as skateboarding or dancing spent a week teaching colleagues their talents. It was part of an initiative the f irm called “summer camp,” complete with inf latable fire logs and beach balls.
Chief Executive Avi Steinlauf called the experience “electric” and an opportunity for employees to grow professionally and personally.
A year ago, Boingo moved to new space in Westwood, shrinking the CEO suite by two- thirds but introducing walls employees can write on and more meeting spaces. The changes made it easier to show prospective hires that the company was hip, executives said.
But things haven’t gone so well for United Online, which after receiving a private- equity buyout offer last fall began exploring “strategic” options for its slate of businesses. Last week, the Woodland Hills company sold social media website StayFriends to a German media company for about $ 18 million.
That leaves United On- line holding Internet service providers NetZero and Juno, a budding effort to launch a cellphone service and shopping apps including MyPoints.
Francis Lobo, a former AOL executive who had sought to revive the company as CEO, was ousted last fall. Lobo, who found it ridiculous that he could go from his car to his office without ever seeing another employee, quickly moved the company across a parking lot to a new building. He pushed three f loors of employees into half a f loor.
He changed the way workers planned projects, so that technical updates would be accessible to users sooner. In came sporadic hackathons, another way to encourage collaboration. Out went meetings with no purpose. As the efforts came together, Lobo expressed hope for some new online shopping apps.
But his struggles to win over investors and users offer a cautionary tale about the difficulties faced by oldline tech companies, which must wisely use their slimming coffers to invest in and successfully foster new brands.
Tinder acquisition teases next feature
Tinder, another Los Angeles dating company, has acquired Humin, a friends and contacts management service that had brief ly grabbed a spotlight in Silicon Valley.
Tinder said Humin, whose apps sync contacts across services and make it easy to chat with nearby strangers, would form the basis of new products, without providing details. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Humin co- founders Ankur Jain and David Wyler have taken vice president roles at Tinder, based in West Hollywood.
“It became abundantly clear that we were both fighting for the same thing,” Jain said in a statement. “We wanted to use technology to get people off their phones and building relationships in the real world.”
The look and simplicity of Humin’s app had attracted the Silicon Valley community as early users, but it wasn’t clear how the app would spread or generate significant revenue.
Honest Co. moves into new digs
Honest Co. held a ribboncutting ceremony last week for its new headquarters in Playa Vista, where Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke alongside Honest co- founders Jessica Alba and Sean Kane.
The home care products brand, which has recently been the subject of controversy over its ingredients, joins a growing list of tech companies in Playa Vista. Others include Facebook, YouTube and Fullscreen.
The new 80,000- squarefoot office, designed by the firm Consort, is nearly three times bigger and has double the number of desks at the company’s former headquarters in Santa Monica. The space is split across three f loors, connected by a staircase. It’s topped by a large rooftop patio.
Founded in 2011, Honest has amassed more than $ 220 million in funding and a valuation of $ 1.7 billion. It’s rumored to be seeking an IPO this year.