Digital Match Making

Just open the matrimonial ads in the newspapers and you will see what people in any culture believe to be the basis for a happy marriage. That could mean flaunting one's salary or the name of the employer or the profession of the potential mate. Some will state what kind of a horoscope, caste or even skin color they seek. Some will talk about how well placed the family members are or even their religious inclination or food habits. We are after all the world's youngest country. It is natural to see this quest to find the perfect match. If the match is successful, everyone will nod in agreement and say, "marriages are made in heaven". That is what they also say when the marriage goes bad.The process of finding a match is not easy when it comes to finding the right employer. Or the perfect employee. Employers complain about fickle minded employees who join and quit organizations and become one more statistic when the firm reports rising attrition numbers. If the employee stays should one conclude that it has been a successful match? Employers will shake their heads and point to dwindling employee engagement figures.The educational institutes have specialized placement cells. These are the matchmakers who must find an employer for each student. That is often a distant dream. Part of the problem is that the students lack information about employers beyond a handful who are seen as aspirational. When it comes to selecting students who don't have work experience, some employers offer jobs to the ones with top grades. In a college that offers multiple disciplines, some disciplines get multiple employers while some departments get no takers for even their top students. Some offer jobs to those who have held "leadership positions" in college. The few employers who brand themselves right become aspirational for everyone. In keeping with Pareto's Law, twenty percent students get eighty percent of the job offers.Accessibility of the college also affects the placement process. Busy executives tend to favour the colleges that are the easiest to reach and offer the best chance of finding the right student. So which student has the best chance of finding a job? The one who makes it easy and convenient for the employer. If the two person startup is looking to hire the third employee, they can never hope to attract as many students as the more established big budget organizations.Pareto's Law applies to employers as well. Twenty percent of them get to choose from a larger pool while the rest get to scrape the bottom of the barrel. When a student has more than one employer interested, they are often given "exploding offers" by the employer that forces them to accept the offer in a few hours or risk having it withdrawn. We all know that holding a gun to the head is not the smartest way to get anyone to decide between two or more equally compelling offers.It is harder to say if matchmaking is tougher when it comes to finding the right spouse or the right employer or the right employee. The answer may lie in leveraging technology to do the matchmaking. Imagine a portal where the students can sign up and share information beyond the grades and a few hobbies. They could actually create a digital portfolio of the projects that they were passionate about. The plan for a start-up that never materialized. The audio track of the song he or she composed. Video snippets of the play put up in the first year of college. The sketch of the aeroplane that doubles as an auditorium and other projects that showcase what matters to the individual.The employer could use the digital platform to go beyond the employers version of a résumé and talk about the culture of the company. They could show the potential employee a view of the workplace and show off the cafeteria. More than that they could build interactive models or put up snippets of talks given by the thought leaders of the company. Perhaps they could have a day in the life of the project team they are hiring for. Digital interactions could run through the year. The platform could have an algorithm that finds the right match from a very large pool of students and a range of employers.Collegefeed is a US based start-up that is doing exactly this. They have thousands of students who range from the top colleges to those which are relatively unknown. The employers that are unable to visit every campus are not at a disadvantage because the algorithm of the site will find the perfect match based on keywords. The employers find the digital marketplace a low cost way to build their brand awareness and engage over time with a much wider pool of candidates. Since students get a chance to choose their top three choices for an employer, the site can put up a dynamic list of companies that are becoming the most coveted. The site is currently limited to the US market where the cost of hiring a college graduate can be as high as $3000 making that a $8 billion market.The search firms and headhunters focus on working with those who have more than five years of work experience. Those early inn.their careers are left to depend on .the inefficient process of the placement cells of their college. Between the first job offer and then next few years they are like the trapeze artist who has let go of one swing but has not gripped the next one. For the freshly minted professionals the digital career fairs may be just the answer. Fortunes lie at the bottom of the pyramid for sure.------------First published in Human Capital magazine in June 2014Join me on Twitter @AbhijitBhaduri