Though I’ve never had the opportunity to try an online dating site, I do have some interest in the industry. First, I think that online dating and online job search have a lot in common. Second, a lot of online marketing innovation comes out of the online dating industry. Third, I have a good friend who has a side project in the online dating space, and I enjoy learning from him and helping him build the business. I guess that’s why I’d heard of Zoosk before. Or maybe it’s those commercials with a bunch of really good-looking people huddled around a computer having fun on a dating site. Either way, I didn’t really bother to take a closer look at San Francisco, CA based Zoosk until I got an e-mail from a reader who recently landed a job there. Now I realize that Zoosk has kind of come out of nowhere to be a massive force in online dating. They have millions of users (they’re apparently bigger than Match.com) and a revenue run rate that was pushing towards $100 million annually back in February.

Social Dating?

I have two hesitations about Zoosk. The first is that they chose to include “zoo” in the name of a dating site. The second is that they use the term “social dating.” Isn’t dating inherently social? Anyway, the concept behind Zoosk is that it’s built on apps that run on top of existing social networks like Facebook. I think there’s also some element of having your friends help you pick dates (that’s what the commercials insinuate), but I couldn’t find a good description of how that works. The business model is a freemium subscription model. You get limited access for free, and you need to pay up to actually interact with people and land dates. Plenty of people are paying up, and a lot seem to be getting their money’s worth–at least if you go by Zoosk’s Success Stories. They also seem to be a good place for job search success stories, as they’re growing very quickly. Zoosk has a wonderful Careers site that provides a lot of information on what it’s like to work for them. From there you can check out their open positions which include Marketing Associate, Freelance Videographer, and a number of Software Engineer positions. The reader who e-mailed me got a position in User Operations, so that could be an option to.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• Zoosk.com
• Jobs at Zoosk
• About Zoosk
• Working at Zoosk
• Zoosk News
• Zoosk’s Blog

Have you tried Zoosk?

We've identified Zoosk as having career opportunities in the following categories:

• all employers
• California
• customer service
• dating
• marketing
• mobile
• online marketing
• operations
• production
• social media
• social networking
• video
• web development

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