eHarmony for the Labor Market?

eHarmony, Match, and Tinder have all created business models around a critical matching problem: Find your soulmate—or maybe in the case of Tinder, your mate for a few hours. It’s a model familiar to investors and consumers alike. Matchmakers are both solving for a complex, human problem, and generating billions in revenue.

Similar technologies have been applied to the labor market by firms like LinkedIn to transform the way employers find talent and to match individuals with jobs. And in the last three years alone, more than 250 venture-backed firms have emerged to connect talent more directly to opportunities in the workforce. These new companies are addressing the supply-demand mismatch that has employers scrambling to better identify talent, as well as the development of workplace competencies, tech skills, or informal and formal training. By some estimates, there is now a $2.9 billion-plus marketplace of funding for workforce technology in the U.S.

At the heart of this rapid innovation is a translation problem between job-seekers and would-be employers that, according to our recent analysis of more than 100 million job postings, resumes and social profiles, appears to be accelerating.

Here’s why:

First, employers do a poor job of signaling their needs by overloading job postings with an endless list of technical skills when in fact, they are looking to pair specific technical skills with “human” skills like leadership, collaboration, creativity, ethics, and cognitive flexibility.

Our analysis found that growing demand for human skills is, in some ways, exacerbating the disconnect between educational institutions and employers, job descriptions and job seekers. Employers rely on technical skills within job postings, in part, because they feel objective or verifiable. Employers can demand, and job-seekers provide, proxies for technical skills in the form of degrees, credentials, and certificates. But today, the fastest-growing job categories are hybrids, which demand a combination of technical and human skills.

Technical skills matter, but human skills can make the difference in getting a job and progressing in it. It’s no longer enough to present one without the other. As the complexity of the challenge grows, so does the demand for matchmaking solutions.

Journalism is a great example, with many reporter and editor job postings—as well as ads for marketing and public relations professionals—now resembling those for IT roles. Now journalists must not only report, write or develop stories; they must also demonstrate metrics-based interpretive skills, fluency in analytics capabilities like search engine optimization (SEO), JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, and experience using Google Analytics to better understand who is accessing their content.

Second, higher education institutions have been slow to adapt to the language used by the labor market to describe the human skills valued in the workplace. A human skill like communication, for example might mean one thing to educational—and something entirely different in fields like marketing and PR. That broad skill translates into capabilities in social media marketing, brand management, press release writing, SEO, integrated marketing strategies, advertising campaigns, email marketing, and storytelling. In human resources, communication manifests as onboarding, conflict resolution, advising, cold calling, and change management. In behavioral health, demand for the very same skill may manifest as skills like grief counseling, social services, mental health counseling, or hotline etiquette.

It’s not that educators and employers value different things (everyone wants skilled, adaptable thinkers), but the communications gap is vast—and investors are taking note of the serious inefficiencies in the market. Our analysis suggests that while terms like “liberal arts” may not resonate with modern employers, liberal arts programs often develop the sorts of human—creative, problem-solving—skills that employers are so desperately seeking.

Of course, the need for better matching will only grow, as the shelf life of skills continues to shrink—and the pace (and frequency) of career transitions accelerates. If early baby-boomers will have undergone 12 career transitions by the time they retire, and if millennials are job-hopping three times more than non-millennials, how many shifts will Gen Z workers experience? And how will new forms of matchmaking help them to connect their skills with the jobs of tomorrow?