Milestones

If you’re looking for love, eHarmony is one of the most trusted names in the biz. But what if you’re in the market for new employment? With the launch of Elevated Careers, eHarmony hopes to become a go-to destination for job seekers as well as singles.

After three years in development, Elevated Careers finally launched on April 1. eHarmony hopes its many years of matching experience will be equally as successful matching job hunters with positions as it has been matching singles.

“When you have a job you are compatible with on the levels that are most important to you, then the likelihood of you being happy in it skyrockets,” reads the website. “And who doesn’t want to be fulfilled in their work? We find those jobs for you by using technology that has proven to make successful long-term careers.”

Elevated Careers is based on a three-level compatibility system:

• Skills: Using data from millions of resumes and career transitions, Elevated predicts how compatible you are with a job based on your skills and background, and how likely you are to be hired for that position.
• Culture: Culture compatibility between companies and employees greatly increases overall job satisfaction, so Elevated emphasizes how your core values fit with a company’s.
• Personality: Elevated helps you avoid personal conflict at work by showing how compatible your personality will be with any prospective hiring manager.

To get started, upload your resume and fill out the Profile Builder section. Elevated Careers then creates a Compatibility Scorecard based on the information you provide. The Scorecard shows your compatibility with your current company and is also used to match you with job listings. You can automatically see the job matches tailored uniquely to you. You can also search based on your provided demographics, or input your own keywords and search parameters.

Once you have found a job match, you can apply directly for the job, as well as view compatibility details and predicted job satisfaction with that specific company. You are also able to save a job listing you'd like to come back to later.

All functionality and features of the Elevated Careers site are currently free for job seekers. Anyone can register and create their profile, search for jobs, get matches, apply for jobs and, where available, be in direct contact with hiring managers. In the future, the company plans to add premium features for a fee.

Companies can also sign up for an Elevated account for free, but registering for a paid subscription provides access to a wider range of features, including the ability to see all available candidate details, post searchable job listings, and directly contact candidates.

What’s eHarmony’s end game? Well, just as the original site came about because Neil Clark Warren believed there was a better way of finding love than relying on luck, Elevated believes that if jobs and employees are matched based on compatibility, people will be more satisfied and fulfilled in their jobs, and companies will have higher rates of employee retention, motivation, engagement, and productivity. That’s a world any of us would be happy to live in.

Lulu, a dating app designed to help women rate and share information about the men they date, has become part of online dating giant Badoo.

Lulu has had an interesting history. Founded in 2011 by Alexandra Chong, the app was originally created to help women have a safer online dating experience by encouraging them to communicate with other women over the app about the men they dated. Users were given the ability to rate their dates according to looks, humor, ambition, and even sexual prowess. They could also add pre-made hashtags for more detailed examples describing a man, like #OneWomanMan, #WillActSilly or #EpicLaugh.

Are You Interested (AYI), the first online dating service to utilize Facebook connections in its matchmaking process by pairing friends of friends in the same social media circles, has announced that it has rebranded its AYI app and website.

The new service is called FirstMet, which parent company Snap Interactive says “reflects the company’s vision for making it easier for single adults to meet new people in a friendly, low-pressure environment.” At first glance, the design of FirstMet is similar, and the app still uses Facebook as a connection tool. However, the experience is specifically designed for mobile users, as opposed to AYI’s online service.

AYI launched in 2007, and has since gained about 30 million users worldwide. While the app attracted a nice user base, rivals like Tinder and the traditional dating sites like Match still cornered the market for attracting new and more active users.

Happn, a France-based dating app that uses geolocation to connect singles who cross paths in everyday life, has reached a major milestone: 10 million members.

The app works much like Tinder, but on a hyperlocal scale. When you walk by another user, their profile is added to the top of your feed. Every potential match you see was near you at some point during the day. The more you scroll, the further back in time you go. Tap a heart to like the profiles that catch your eye and dismiss the rest by tapping a cross. If there's a mutual match, you can start chatting for free.

“When we launched Happn in 2014, we aimed to fill a void in the online dating scene by offering a way for people to connect with those they’ve crossed paths with in real-life – and really, a way to put the spontaneity back into dating,” said co-founder and CEO Didier Rappaport, in a statement.

The strategy seems to be working. Happn is reportedly on track to reach 30 million users by the end of the year.

Millions of happy daters aren't the only big news for the app. Happn has also announced a new voice feature that will allow users to send audio recordings up to one minute long to each other. Happn hopes that the clips will make it easier for users to showcase their unique personalities before meeting up.

Rappaport said in a statement: "This new voice feature provides our members with another opportunity to connect on a more personal level and create meaningful relationships."

To use the new feature, click the mic icon that now appears inside a conversation chain. Hold the button down while recording and release it to finish. When it's complete, you can either send the message or cancel it. On the receiving end, a user simply needs to click on a recording to listen to it. The feature has already rolled out to all iOS and Android users.

Rappaport told Business Insider last November that a number of new features are planned for Happn in hopes of catching up with rival Tinder. "For us, the evolution of our product is really important," he said. "We want to make a service that is more and more rich for our users and one that allows them to express themselves much more."

"The voice is something that is very emotional," he continued. "Just listening to the voice of someone else can give you a lot of impression."

As for what else the future holds for Happn, we'll have to wait and see.

Friends Reunited won’t be available to message, post and keep in touch anymore. The once-popular social site, founded in 2000, was left in the dust by rivals such as MySpace and later, to a larger extent, Facebook.

Friends Reunited has a turbulent history. At one point a tech darling after quickly gaining three million subscribers in 2003, it was sold to ITV in 2005 for 125 million pounds, or about $208 million US. At its peak, 23 million users were on Friends Reunited.

But what the company didn’t intend was that employers would begin to use the service to check on potential and current employees, gauging what they said on social media as opposed to how they conducted themselves at work. It led to businesses using the site as a way to spy on employees, gathering information such as whether an employee was looking for another job, what they were saying about co-workers, or what interviewees and potential employees were saying online that could be potentially harmful.

At one stage, according to UK newspaper The Telegraph, Friends Reunited was blamed for a spike in the divorce rate on the grounds it encouraged classroom sweethearts to rekindle romances.

Instead of a positive, uplifting social experience where people felt secure to engage and share, the company found its platform being used as a way to spy on people for bad behavior. Naturally, users over time stopped posting and using the service. Membership dropped, especially when Facebook entered the picture a couple of years later. While Facebook continued to gain users, Friends Reunited found itself floundering.

The company was sold yet again in 2009 to DC Thompson for only 25 million pounds, and had only a fraction of its user base still active on the site. In 2012, the company decided to do a reboot and rebrand itself “Memory Box,” hoping to take on Facebook’s rapid growth. Memory Box did not succeed.

In 2014, DC Thompson offered the platform back to the original founder of Friends Reunited Steve Pankhurst, who thought he could restart the fledgling website. But in an announcement made on self-publishing platform Medium, Pankhurst announced its closure in January.

He wrote on Medium: "The first part of our plan was to put Friends Reunited back to make it more like the original site  --  that is, listing your schools and memories of your school days." However, this didn't really happen.

Pankhurst is now working on a new social media site called Liife, which allows you to upload photos and mark and share them with friends to identify significant “moments,” like trips, awards ceremonies or graduations. He said the new site would in no way replace Friends Reunited.

The related service Friends Reunited Dating still appears to be in operation and is not affected by the closing of the social service Friends Reunited. For more information on dating site please read our review of Friends Reunited Dating.

eHarmony is saying 'Hola!' to a new site designed to serve Spanish-speaking singles. The company says the new addition to the eHarmony family, eHarmony.com/espanol, will provide a fully translated, localized experience for the 37 percent of bilingual users who speak Spanish.

As always, eHarmony used its famous research-based approach to build the compatibility model that is the backbone of the Spanish site. To update it for a new audience, the algorithim now takes into account linguistic and cultural nuances that are important in the matching process.

“In the last few years, we have seen online dating come into its own and today we are seeing growth in every user demographic,” said Dr. Neil Clark Warren. “That trend continues around the world as online dating is recognized as a way to meet someone special. Our purpose has always been to help our users find lasting, meaningful relationships and the launch of this site represents another way to reach those who are hoping to be found by that perfect partner and confidant.”

The development of this new site speaks directly to the company’s continued growth as a global brand. eHarmony hopes to appeal to an increasingly large demographic of online daters in Latin America, where online dating is growing at a rate of 20 percent year over year according to independent market research.

New features will become available on the site in the coming months, including mobile access and localized experiences for Spanish-speakers around the world. Beginning in December, current eHarmony users can elect to fill out a mini-questionnaire in Spanish to be better matched with those who set up their profiles in Spanish.

eHarmony has every reason to be invested in its global growth. According to a report published on eHarmony.co.uk, 50 percent of all relationships could begin online by 2031. By 2040, that number could jump to 70 percent. As profits increase along with the number of users, eHarmony wants to be at the forefront of every new development.

To celebrate the release of eHarmony.com/espanol, eHarmony has introduced a friends and family special. New users can get three months free when using the promo code “AMIGOS2015”. eHarmony.com/espanol is currently available in the United States and will be introduced in several other countries, including Mexico and Spain, over the course of 2016.

For more information, visit eHarmony.com/espanol or read our eHarmony review or eHarmony.co.uk review