When it comes to deciding where to work, you don’t want LinkedIn — you want eHarmony.
At least that’s the idea behind Path.to, a job matchmaking start-up launching on Tuesday.
The new website asks job candidates to fill out a survey about their job preferences including location, salary, benefits and work environment. Other users can vouch for their skills, and endorsements are weighted depending on the reputation of those who give them.
To further verify their interests and expertise, candidates connect their profiles to social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, and to professional communities, such as Behance, Dribbble, Forrst and Github.
Path.to uses all of this information to create a compatibility rating for each job it recommends. When candidates apply, employers can easily rank them by the same score. Both parties can indicate which results they like and dislike in order to improve future results.
For now, Path.to only lists tech jobs in San Francisco’s Bay Area. The start-up has signed up about 120 hiring companies to pay per job listing. It has also accepted a $1.5 million investment from staffing firm Adecco and plans to incorporate a product for third-party staffing firms at some point.
But a recent review of dating sites that use algorithms to match potential couples found their claims of predicting true love don’t pan out. Can an algorithmic matchmaking process work any better when it comes to jobs? “What eHarmony is looking for is a deeper, emotional understanding of a person for a broader set of reasons,” Path.to founder Darren Bounds says. “Ours is for a more specific purpose.”
