#jobfox

I've been wrong more times than I can count, but sometimes I get it right. Hate to say I told you so.

When news broke back in 2013 that eHarmony, the well-known algorithmic dating service, was launching a product to revolutionize recruiting, I scoffed. Hard.

In a 2013 blog post entitled "3 Reasons eHarmony’s Job Matching Will Suck," I said "Recruiting isn’t dating. Motivation to fill out a 29-point questionnaire works if you’re hoping to find true love. It doesn’t work so well with employment. In order for matching to truly work, but parties - in this case, job seeker and employer - must fill out a lengthy dataset.

"Successful matching doesn’t occur magically, no matter what computer scientists tell you. Only the most desperate job seekers will do it and employers don’t want to compete lengthy forms to access these candidates."

I outlined additional reasons such as 1) no history of success and 2) no core competency in recruitment as reasons eHarmony would fail.

Fast forward to yesterday, and word comes out that the company is essentially shuttering the service, know as Elevated Careers, in hopes of finding a buyer to take over the business.

In a letter sent to potential buyers, as reported by Matt Charney, the company said, "The eHarmony™ Board has decided that the highest and best use of Elevated Careers™ will be with an enterprise with substantial existing strength in B-to-B HR Services marketing, sales and relationship management – and for this reason has decided to divest control of Elevated Careers™ to an entity with the capabilities to better achieve the commercial potential of this HR Tech innovation."

Translation: We don't know what the hell we're doing and want to unload this on to some sucker who thinks they might.

It's important to note even though this venture was first discussed back in 2013, Elevated Careers has only been an official business since 2016, announcing it's launch on April Fool's Day.

Yes, April Fool's Day. How apropos.

So what happened? I still think the things I outlined back in 2013 hold true, but the real reason Elevated Careers failed can be traced back to Fall 2012. On Sept. 12 of that year, Tinder launched, and dating hasn't been the same since. Built for a mobile-first consumer, the app turned meeting people into a game, swiping right or left based on location and visual appeal. The service was and still is (mostly) free today.

The days of filling out long questionnaires and creating lengthy profiles in order to find a mate are numbered. As such, eHarmony's days are ultimately numbered.

Fighting a two-front war with multiple companies and dwindling resources couldn't last. Kudos to them for cutting their losses early, but I believe it was a final chapter written the very day it began.

Look who's getting into the job matching game.

Popular algorithmic dating site eHarmony went mainstream last week that they have their eye on the job search marketplace.

“It seems like there’s a social problem here that needs fixing, much in the same that when we started with relationship matching, there just seemed to be a problem,” said Grant Langston, eHarmony’s vice president of customer experience.

In theory, this seems like a match (pun intended) made in heaven, but I'll go ahead and predict disaster.

Here are three reasons eHarmony-for-jobs will flop.

1. It's never worked before. We've been down this road before. The story doesn't end well. Remember itzbig, Climber, Jobfox and Trovix? They're all gone as matching solutions and only Trovix, a Monster acquisition, cashed out ... nevermind the eventual product, 6sense, failed to round the bases.

Langston said, "We don’t see a company in the jobs market that is providing an 'eHarmony-like' matching service." There's a reason. Google it.

2. No core competency. Big companies with lots of traffic have tried to made inroads into employment for years. Remember eBay's Kijiji or MySpace jobs? They didn't make a dent in Craigslist.

The hubris of company's with eyeballs and brand who think they can make a splash in recruiting never ends well. And, by the way, it reeks of desperation.

3. Recruiting isn't dating. Motivation to fill out a 29-point questionnaire works if you're hoping to find true love. It doesn't work so well with employment. In order for matching to truly work, but parties - in this case, job seeker and employer - must fill out a lengthy dataset. Successful matching doesn't occur magically, no matter what computer scientists tell you.

Only the most desperate job seekers will do it and employers don't want to compete lengthy forms to access these candidates.

The guys at Yahoo! Finance were equally skeptical.

Remember itzbig (see pic)? Trovix? Climber v1.0? The original Jobfox? It's sort of like remembering your first iPod and its navigation wheel. These were the original "eHarmony for jobs" players.

Similar to the popular dating service, these solutions hoped to magically pair candidates with employers based on sophisticated algorithms.

It didn't go too well.

Trovix, the big winner, sold to Monster for like $70 million and became 6Sense. Climber pivoted. itzbig went to Jobtarget. Jobfox is on life support.

The problem? Typical chicken and egg stuff, which is common in online classifieds. Job seekers had to fill out complicated forms and employers did likewise.

I'm not sure either got much out the time invested. Trovix, in contrast, didn't require the same commitment, which is likely the reason they saw a payday.

This trend started around 2006 and pretty much ended with The Great Recession.

Fast forward to today, and they're back. Only the names have changed to protect the innocent.

Heard of Path.to? Bright? Silp? These are the new kids on the job-matching block.

History tells us these startups are headed for the same eharmonious scrap heap of their forefathers. But they're betting on an infrastructure that didn't exist in the first generation:

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn ... in other words, The Social Graph.

Maybe this will help:

It's not a bad idea. These new services leverage - varying degrees - a candidate's social activity and footprint in order to match them up with the right job or employer. So, let's say you tweet a lot about HTML5, CSS3, iOS and Android. Chances are, you're a mobile developer and thus, such jobs would come your way.

"Culture is just as important as being a good technical fit," said Path.to CEO Darren Bounds. "The ubiquity of social networks, even niche networks like GitHub, has allowed us to tap into a new dataset - what you're interested in, what kind of environment do you want to work, are you single, married, liquid, a recent grad?

"We know this information now. The first generation didn't have this backbone. A big data approach to hiring can eliminate 80 percent of the work being done by humans."

I root for companies like these. The Davids armed with a technological slingshot. A better mousetrap. Unfortunately for them, however, the current mousetraps are usually just fine for most people.

Being armed with an ever-growing social graph may not change that reality. The issue of selling employers on the idea and supplying enough job seekers to make it all worthwhile is still as prevalent today as it was in 2006.

In what may be an ominous sign for this trend, fellow matching site WorkFu added an update to their site late last month:

UPDATE 31/08/2012: We are currently in discussions regarding the possibilities of keeping WorkFu alive and will update as soon as we have more information.

A few weeks ago, I uncovered some information about Jobfox that seemed to indicate the company was on the skids, noting their founder had left and comments on Glassdoor about employees not getting paid.

Since that post, a few reputable contacts have come forward with insight, although nothing concrete on the future of Jobfox has surfaced.

One confidant said the end of Jobfox was way overdue, underscoring the company had stopped paying checks to them as an affiliate and had been passed to collections on other outstanding bills.

Every penny counts, and it sucks that we'll probably not get the money that's owed to us.

More notably, however, was the job site CEO who has been stiffed by Jobfox and said he'd be willing to help fund a lawsuit if employees filed one.

Their fearless leader [Rob McGovern] managed not to pay some very large bills to a lot of people in the industry as well. Kept running them up even after it was very clear they were bankrupt. I for one would make a contribution to the legal fund of any employee who wants to sue him personally, since walking off without paying your employees as a corporate officer pierces the corporate veil in many states.

There's even a rumor that Jobfox is in the red to the tune of six figures for at least one vendor. Those hit hardest seem to be the vertical job search engines who added Jobfox postings - which few were actually unique to Jobfox - to their search results on a pay-per-click basis.

What's more, the company has allegedly left their resume writers high-and-dry. According to comments left on Trademarkia, a trademark reservation service hosting Rob McGovern's apparent new biz Cobrain:

Cobrain is owned and operated by Rob J. Mcgovern. He criminally and intentionally scammed his resume writers at jobfox, and used the money to fund Cobrain. Rob McGovern is a degenerate and should be held accountable for the more than $250K he owes the 100+ writers.

Another anonymous commenter calls McGovern a "charlatan," saying he owes at least 50 writers more than $100,000. Adding, instead he siphoned the money to start this business. He is unethical and nobody should do business with him."

According to the trademark, Cobrain is a coupons, rebates, price comparison information, product reviews and discount information service. Well outside the employment space.

Looks like this is one fox that's moving on to a different chicken coop.