eHire
(Feb 11, 2009) The PR reads:
"One United Community. One Powerful Experience.
Candidates and recruiters are now able to enjoy a universal networking and career-centric platform that is the technological adhesive for developing trusting relationships, saving valuable time, and advancing rewarding careers."
Huh? Technological adhesive? Super Glue for Jobs? "Can you help me? I used eHire and now I am stuck in my job."
According to a recent press release,
"eHire has built the first low-cost candidate-centric and transparent job matching online recruitment platform that gives both candidates a voice in the hiring process and enables recruiters/employers to efficiently find qualified candidates. In essence, the eHire community-based application is the "eHarmony" for online recruiting, and includes features such as a multi-layered matching engine, a robust scoring mechanism, social networking components, comparative application and qualification views, career check-up services, and the automatic parsing of resumes, and more."
Thank goodness, what we’ve been missing is one more eHarmony for Jobs.
Here’s the list so far (If you have any additions, I’d love to see them.)
What’s surprising is that someone would launch a service with this sort of branding this late in the game. Although Harry Joiner said it best, there have been an endless supply of articles detailing the problems with matching. To summarize Joiner, there are five reasons that eHarmony won’t work for jobs:
- Companies often don’t know what they want the new employee to do
- Many jobs have no defined skill set
- All candidates are liars
- People are terrified to specialize
- Resumes and online "profiles" aren’t people
There may be real value in the eHire model. No one will ever notice if they keep this sort of marketing up.
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3 Comments
6. It is perfectly legal to say you will only date a [race] [gender] [religion] under the age of [x] with a low body mass index.
OK, I’m being slightly puckish here, but I do think the compliance issue has a way of knocking the wind out of a lot of good ideas. All you need is one person on the buying committee to raise the question and you leave the realm of effectiveness and enter that of legal hair-splitting. While it may not be on the tip of everyone’s tongue, I feel like it has a stunting effect on the market.
The type of development that you need to do in order to achieve and maintain compliance is in many ways the opposite of the type of work you do in order to make something innovative like this work. The latter often involves all manner of shortcuts, hacks, half-solutions, and other groping in the dark, while the former is all about making sure every I is dotted and every T crossed. One is a game for a nimble small upstart and the other is made for a stable, lumbering incumbent.
The irony is that a truly effective algorithmic matching approach might be the most non-discriminatory system possible. But compliance is often less about results than it is about process.
Also, it is amusing to note that all of your 5 items are true of online dating as well.
It’s really cool when someone disagrees with you and they’re right. Thanks for keeping me on track, Colin.
John, thanks for your negative comments, 40 years of recruiting and always giving the candidate a fair shake is our legacy.
Wait till the platform is out of BETA in May, you will see,
Joe Sabrin
eHire
Founder
3 Trackbacks
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[...] who imagined that the future revolved around the “eHarmony for Jobs.”(The idea was tired a couple of years ago.) I regaled him with stories of Intellimatch, itzBig, JobFox, and 40 other [...]