在线交友正变成主流 用科技战胜孤独

Neil Clark Warren has a bold ambition. He wants “people to have a job they love and a marriage they wouldn’t change for anything”. For the 79-year-old founder and chief executive of dating site eHarmony now wants to match job hunters with employers.
尼尔•克拉克•沃伦(Neil Clark Warren)有一个大胆的愿望。他希望“人们拥有一份自己热爱的工作和一段他们拿什么也不会去换的婚姻”。这位80岁的交友网站eHarmony创始人和首席执行官，现在希望实现求职者与雇主的配对。

The dating marketplace is crowded. Online dating, once stigmatised, is now mainstream.
交友市场已经饱和。曾背负骂名的在线交友正变成主流。

Eharmony, founded in 2000, today competes with niche sites catering for users from vegetarians to Ayn Rand fans, as well as social media and apps such as Tinder. Though Dr Warren patently sees his site, which claims to have been responsible for 600,000 marriages, as a cut above those facilitating mere hookups. “Tinder and eHarmony are in two different businesses. Tinder is very superficial; it’s based on looks.”
Eharmony创建于2000年，如今与其竞争的是一些专门服务于各类细分用户（从素食主义者到艾恩•兰德(Ayn Rand)的粉丝）的网站以及社交媒体和Tinder等应用。然而，沃伦博士显然认为自己的网站优于那些只是安排约会的网站。该网站声称促成了60万桩婚姻。“Tinder和eHarmony处于两种不同的业务。Tinder非常肤浅；它基于外表。”

Dr Warren wants to broaden eHarmony’s appeal and become a “relationship company”. Not just making love and job matches but also fixing retirees up with advisers and the isolated with friends. He sees loneliness as one of the biggest problems in modern society. Technology, he concedes, is a double-edged sword, both contributing to and combating isolation.
沃伦博士希望拓宽eHarmony的吸引力，使其变成一家“关系公司”。不仅撮合爱情和工作，还会帮助退休人士与顾问、孤独人群与朋友牵线。他将孤独视为现代社会的最大问题之一。他承认，科技是一把双刃剑，既导致了孤独，也能被用来战胜孤独。

But first he is going after the jobs giants, LinkedIn and Monster. In December eHarmony’s subsidiary Elevated Careers will launch in the US. Dr Warren believes there is an untapped market of unfulfilled professionals. “Over 70 per cent of employees identify themselves as not engaged or actively disengaged from their jobs. We think we can reduce the amount of turnover and raise the level of productivity for companies by matching candidates with the right job, in the right career, with the right company.” He insists he can counter the modern career pattern of serial jobs in multiple companies and turn employees monogamous.
然而，首先他要效仿那些猎头巨擘LinkedIn和Monster。今年12月，eHarmony的子公司Elevated Careers将在美国创建。沃伦认为，怀才不遇的专业人士市场尚未被开发。“超过70%的员工认为自己没有投入到工作中或者根本无心工作。我们认为，我们可以通过帮助求职者找到合适的工作、合适的职业、乃至合适的公司，来降低企业的流动率并提高生产率。”他坚持表示，他能够应对现代职场中连续跳槽、供职于多家公司的模式，让员工对企业忠诚。

The fallout of those who flit from job to job is far-reaching, he says. His wife’s father, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, moved jobs 17 times. “That has an impact”, he says. “When a person is unhappy at their job . . . it affects their home life, their marriage, their personal relationships, their relationships with their co-workers . . . [It has] a negative effect on the productivity of the organisations for which they are working.”
他表示，员工不断跳槽的影响深远。他的岳父、一位麻省理工学院(MIT)毕业生换了17份工作。“这是有影响的，”他表示，“如果人们对工作不满……这会影响他们的家庭生活、婚姻、私人关系、与同事的关系……（这）会对他们所在企业的生产率造成负面影响。”

So for the past two years he has set social scientists and technology employees to work on the criteriaand algorithms that will help employees and employers find “the one”. The dating site asks subscribers to answer about 150 questions to help identify values and personality. So Dr Warren envisages a questionnaire to unearth a candidate’s skills, expectation of culture and personality.
因此，过去两年，他聘请社会学专家和科技员工开始研究相关标准和算法，帮助员工和雇主找到匹配的“另一半”。该交友网站要求用户回答约150个问题，以帮助确定他们的价值观和性格。因此，沃伦博士设计了一份问卷，透视求职者的技能、文化预期和个性。