Zoosk, one of the world’s most popular social dating communities, today announced the launch of its ‘Find a Job. Get a Date.’ recruitment campaign to attract talented software engineers to the fast-growing company. Anyone who applies for open engineering positions at Zoosk and begins employment by September 30, 2011 is eligible for a chance to go on a date with Samantha, the star of Zoosk’s latest TV commercial, ‘Office Romance,’ or Steve, star of Zoosk’s popular TV commercial, ‘Athlete,’ which recently aired in the US, UK and Australia. Zoosk will cover the costs of the date, including a round-trip flight to Los Angeles, a chauffeured limousine and dinner. In conjunction with the recruitment campaign, Zoosk announced a $10,000 referral fee for new engineering hires through September 30, 2011.

More details about the recruitment campaign and referral program can be found at http://www.zoosk.com/competition. Zoosk has also created a short video to promote the campaign that can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5jVPuuK05A.

“With Zoosk’s focus on product innovation and our rapid global growth, we are constantly searching for the best possible engineering talent we can find,” said Alex Mehr, co-founder and co-CEO of Zoosk. “Given our goal to change the face of the online dating category, we thought it only made sense to include a fun date with one of our talented TV actors in our new campaign to attract great engineers.”

Zoosk’s ‘Find a Job. Get a Date.’ recruitment campaign follows the company’s announcement in Q1 of this year that it had grown its sales run rate approximately 250% in one year to more than $90 million, and its inclusion, for the second year in a row, in the Wall Street Journal’s “Next Big Thing” list of promising startups. The company has more than doubled its San Francisco staff to 95 employees in the last 15 months, and hopes to hire several software engineers and other positions for its headquarters in San Francisco’s Financial District.

Zoosk’s commitment to hiring engineering talent has enabled it to bring new products to market quickly and efficiently. Recent product innovations include Zoosk Messenger, a downloadable desktop messenger client that enables users to chat in real-time with potential dates; integration of Facebook “Likes” into dating profiles and profile searches; and live video chat. The company recently added several mobile engineers to its team to accelerate development of the company’s popular iPhone® and Android™ dating apps.

Another recent product development that came out of Zoosk’s engineering team is Socialbox, a side project that let Facebook users video chat with their friends, before Facebook announced their own version of this feature. One of Zoosk’s engineers came up with the idea to mash up the Zoosk Messenger downloadable chat client with Facebook Chat, layering in UX improvements and video capabilities. Zoosk’s co-founders encouraged the team to build it, and within weeks, Socialbox was not only live but growing quickly to more than two million monthly active unique users.

“Socialbox is an example of how we encourage our team to approach their jobs at Zoosk,” blogged Shayan Zadeh, co-founder and co-CEO of Zoosk. “We reward creative thinking and we give our people the resources and support to turn their ideas into reality. We need more people who embody this commitment to innovation.”