A policeman-turned-entrepreneur is relying on a few tricks of his former trade to ply his new business — a relationship advisory service that helps people find the right life partner or salvage an existing relationship based on the psychometric tests otherwise used to nab criminals.

In fact, the corporate sector has for a while deployed these tests to hire the right candidate.

A cyber-crime expert and behavioural specialist, 42-year-old Gaurav Sareen was intrigued by the large number of failed relationships he observed around him — be it in Delhi or in faraway Sydney, where he worked as a policeman for over 12 years.

“In Australia, the social structure is different from India’s. The women there don’t experience the same kind of social constraints. Starting or ending relationships is not as difficult as it is in India. Yet, almost 70 per cent of our work (in Sydney) was related to domestic problems,” he says.

“When lack of communication and compatibility is an issue in a society where there is nothing holding people back, imagine what it would be in India, with its unwritten tenets for men and women,” he adds.

On his return to India in 2010, he explored the idea of devising a foolproof method for determining the compatibility between two people. The result was Perfiniti, the Gurgaon-based company he founded in June 2013 which offers not only tools to help people zero in on a suitable partner but also behavioural coaching.

For a fee of ₹2,500, each couple is put through a psychometric test, licensed from Finland’s Extended DISC. They have to answer 24 simple questions with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Although the questions appear very plain and simple — ‘Do you like watching TV at night?’ or ‘Do you prefer a certain brand of toothpaste?’ for instance — there is an algorithm at work here that measures various personal traits on a scale of minus 5 to plus 5.

Based on the report, couples can opt for behavioural coaching, which cost up to ₹30,000 depending on the number of sessions.

In the year-and-a-half since its launch, the company has “grown much faster than expected”, says Sareen, although he declines to share any numbers.

Ratika Dutt*, a public relations executive in Delhi, was seeing her boyfriend for three years but was unsure about marrying him. “I took this test and the result showed that we were complete opposites. I understood why I hesitated so much to marry him. We parted ways without any hard feelings,” she says.

Interestingly, even long-married couples are using psychometric analysis to iron out mutual differences in the relationship. Rajesh Gupta*, a corporate executive-turned-entrepreneur, was going through a rough patch when his venture didn’t do as well as expected. The excessive time spent outside the home without commensurate financial returns began to impact his married life.

“When my wife told me about Perfiniti, I reluctantly agreed, expecting the same old marriage counsellor garbage. But our compatibility test was interesting — it showed that while I am a risk-taker, my wife is a detail-oriented planner and organiser. While there were other factors too, this was the most important,” he says. The couple signed up for behavioural coaching classes and found it transformative. “We fight less as we have both accepted our differences and made them our strengths,” Rajesh says.

Sareen is currently developing an app (both desktop and mobile versions) for compatibility tests. Users can undergo the app-based test and approach him for analysis and behavioural coaching, if necessary.

(*Names have been changed on request.)

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