You might remember eHarmony’s year-ago launch in Los Angeles to much fanfare; well, there’s buzz that eHarmony’s job technology is “kaput,” as one tweeter said.
Actually, not quite kaput, says eHarmony.
Crystal Miller Lay has done marketing for eHarmony on the jobs matching product. She says the company hasn’t seen any huge drop in its customer numbers, and has about a half dozen customers in its pipeline, but that the product is better off in the hands of a company with business-to-business sales experience.
“They’re selling it as it was starting to gain some adoption,” Miller says. “It’s not that there wasn’t an appetite for it.”
After a potential sale, it could become part of another company’s offerings, she says, but it’s possible it’ll maintain the eHarmony name with a “powered by eHarmony” or similar arrangement.
eHarmony’s fairly small number of customers didn’t all end up using the tool the way you might have expected, in a sort of “let’s-have-candidates-and-employers-screen-each-other-like-potential-dates” sort of way. Some are using it for branding, surveying current employees and job candidates (like those who didn’t take a job) to figure out how people perceive a company; in other words, its employment brand.
One customer’s trying to transform its workforce and its brand from one thing to another, and is using eHarmony in that shift; e.g. we want innovative people; is that who we’re employing? Is that who we’re attracting?
eHarmony’s Dan Erickson, who’ll likely move to the acquiring company, says eHarmony’s doing demos of the product to potentially interested customers, who thus far are other HR technology providers.
Meanwhile, the parent company — eHarmony, that is, not the job-search part of the company — has been trying to simplify its long assessment process, having to compete with startups like Tinder with shorter surveys.