Socialight Case Study

Mobile Social Network Socialight “Finds” Great Talent with Standout Jobs

Socialight is a New York-based startup in the mobile technology space. A location-based social networking platform, Socialight lets people access and share rich media content about real-world physical locations via their mobile phones and web browsers. Using Socialight’s urban recommendation service, users can find useful information relevant to their exact location — such as food, shopping and tourist attractions — recommended by the people they trust, almost anywhere in the world.

Challenge

Socialight is a technology startup with less than 10 employees. The company has an exciting workplace, but limited resources for hiring and staffing programs or recruiters.

Since its creation, Socialight used a variety of tools to find employees, including personal and professional networking, Craigslist, targeted technology forums, and university career sites.

These options varied in terms of the number and quality of job candidates they could reach. But across the board, they failed to effectively brand Socialight as a desirable employer, and empower the company with the tools and flexibility to stand out in a competitive recruiting environment.

Solution

See the Socialight Career Site

Socialight recognized that it needed a more effective way to develop its employer brand, attract job candidates, including “passive” job seekers exploring their options, promote a positive candidate experience, and manage applicants more efficiently through the hiring process. Rather than wait until conditions permitted the company to design its own career portal, Socialight turned to Standout Jobs’ Reception product for a solution, enabling it to showcase its culture and team, advertise open positions, and input job applicants into the hiring process. In January 2008, Socialight became one of the first companies to launch a career portal powered by Standout Jobs’ Reception product.

Results

According to Socialight CEO Dan Melinger, the career site was easy to create: “Just a couple of hours’ work and we were presentable to the world.”

Melinger found Reception’s back-end both light and simple. The process of creating a career site was fast and easy, allowing the company to hit the ground running.

“It was important to us that we could launch the career site quickly, but also make sure that we were doing a great job of representing Socialight as the fantastic and exciting work environment it is. Standing out in a crowded job market isn’t easy, but we’re empowered more than ever now with Standout Jobs,” said Melinger.

In March 2008, Socialight used Reception to advertise a job opening for an intern, and hired the candidate in April 2008. According to Melinger, using Reception to recruit new hires is superior to the company’s previous approach, which was “improvised and decentralized.” Melinger says he intends to continue using Reception.

Socialight’s experience is yet another example of how Standout Jobs is helping companies save time and money, while putting their best foot forward, reaching quality candidates, engaging them and adding them to the team.