eHarmony's Big Data helps you find a date, and soon a job

by Carlin Sack
January 30, 2014

In the late 90s, the team behind eHarmony spent three full years researching compatibility and relationships before even launching the marriage site in 2000. Now, eHarmony’s team is at again. This time, they are looking at the jobs sector, delving into the same lengthy research process so that by early 2015, they can launch a product that matches compatible employees and employers.

Since the beginning, data has driven everything the company does. It’s why eHarmony has earned the title of online dating site that leads to the highest number of marriages (and, in turn, the lowest divorce rates).

“What you would not know about eHarmony is that we are at the forefront of Big Data and machine learning,” Director of Corporate Communications Jaime Rupert said. “We are doing everything as complex as what Google is doing. We are one of the best kept secrets in terms of our technical prowess.”

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eHarmony started out measuring 29 particular character dimensions of each of its users via an online 480-question survey - then let their secret algorithm take it from there to match compatible users. Now, the algorithm is much smarter and more refined. As the data team has correlated the survey results of over 50 million people, they have been able to make even more precise matches with a shorter survey that tops 100 questions.

The brains behind it all is eHarmony’s 170-person Santa Monica team, 60 percent of which is in development. VP of Matching Steve Carter, who has been with eHarmony since the 90s, leads this tech team.

“The fact that eHarmony has developed the technical expertise using flow algorithms, map-reduce, internal cloud computing facilities and NOSQL data stores to score and process more than 3 billion compatible pairings a month is notable,” Carter said.

The technical expertise of eHarmony’s data team, Rupert said, even earned one of the team members a recent invite to NASA’s local offices to give a talk about data strategies.

CEO Neil Clark Warren, a psychologist and relationship expert, set the precedent of data running in eHarmony’s blood during those three initial years of research. eHarmony conducted its own studies, which examined about 800 couples who identified their relationships at various levels of happiness, and from there came up with the 29 dimensions to be measured on the questionnaire. eHarmony still invests in research to back its marriage product even today: just last year the team commissioned a study with John Cacioppo at University of Chicago to study online dating in general. The findings show that one third of people who marry meet online, and of those marriages “eHarmony marriages are happier,” Rupert said.

With this research backing eHarmony up, the team isn’t intimidated by other players in the online dating realm like Match.com and Tinder, Carter said: “No one in the online dating space but eHarmony has ever set out to empirically and scientifically study married couples in order to determine what features in those pairings can be used to predict success between matched singles in the long run.”

Now that eHarmony has found a way to counter high divorce rates through compatibility, up next is solving the problem of employee turnover rates. A small, strategic, internal team of researchers is currently interviewing thousands of people, making models and testing theories.

“It gets really interesting because if you look at the problem of marriages and lessening the divorce rate, we are looking at jobs in the same way,” Rupert said. “The economic cost of turnover for a company is extraordinary, so we are working on creating a way to better match people with the company and the job and their life.”

By sending the job sector product to market in the first quarter of next year, the eHarmony team will be expanding upon its original mission of helping people create great, long-lasting relationships, Rupert said: “Our data is really helping people find happiness. We deliver relationships that change people’s lives for good, forever.”

 

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