Job seekers, this site wants to help you find your career soul mate

If LinkedIn and eHarmony had a baby, it would probably look and act something like HireQ, a nascent job-matching service that two Stanford graduate students built.

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HireQ is a beta-stage product that attempts to predict how a job candidate will fit in at an organization. The two-person company uses a proprietary algorithm and behavioral data to match job seekers with potential life-long partners.

New users identify 10 different positions they might want, and HireQ then categorizes a panoply of attributes based on how similar the qualities are to their personality. It returns matches that should be a great fit for the candidate.

Behind the scenes, HireQ says it determines a person’s hidden preferences and unique traits to figure out their “Career DNA.” Participating employers receive an analysis in similar fashion, with the startup attempting to ascertain a company’s “Job and Culture DNA.” HireQ then scans its database and performs some algorithmic magic to find the right person-company matches.

“We modeled HireQ off of eHarmony in two specific ways,” cofounder Oliver Staehelin told VentureBeat. “First, much like the online dating site, we use questionnaires to gather relevant and valuable information about our users. Second and most important, we use proprietary algorithms focused on creating long-term relationships. The aim here is to help job seekers find their career ‘soul mate,’ a place they will be motivated, happy, and ultimately thrive in.”

Should a candidate find a job match, the person can apply directly through HireQ, and the employer will receive a HireQ-generated report that summarizes why the job seeker is a good fit for the position.

“Quite simply, we believe the recruiting process today is broken,” Staehelin said. “Job seekers still spend countless hours tailoring and sending their resumes to dozens of companies in the hope of securing a coveted interview spot. And employers spend just as many hours sifting through all these resumes looking for the most promising candidates to interview. This is inefficient and misleading for everyone.”

While the idea has merit, it’s very likely that job seekers may spend as much 15 minutes going through the profile set up process only to find that HireQ has no job matches for them. But the barely 1-year-old company is quite young and still looking to build out its employer database, so hopefully this is a problem it might be able to correct in the near future.

HireQ is a two-person startup based in Palo Alto, Calif., that is currently self-funded.

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HireQ is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Nicholaus Haskins/Flickr