Alumni News

by Dan Morrell

Through her startup, Summer Delaney ’11 is helping connect big media companies and abundant–but elusive–pools of talent. Summer knows it can take some real work to find real work these days.

A veteran of the media trenches, Summer found her job as Katie Couric’s producer at Yahoo through a Google listserv for women in journalism. Her role at New York’s WPIX TV station came from the Media Mavens Facebook Group, a collection of 20,000 women and nonbinary media workers. She found a position at Amazon Studios through a Columbia Business School Slack community. “Almost every job I’ve had has been found through these digital communities I was in,” Summer explains. “It wasn’t through applying in the traditional way.”

These are the kinds of jobs, she notes, that are not necessarily popping up on your LinkedIn feed or sent to you via recruiters or broadcast on big job boards. They’re part of a vibrant but unseen world of professional opportunities—what Summer calls the “hidden job market.” In 2022, she founded CollabWORK, which helps connect employers with highly sought-after candidates in the digital communities where they already congregate. 

“It’s really these trusted spaces where people are having very vulnerable and honest conversations about careers and jobs—and there tends to be a currency in them,” says Summer. “A lot of times jobs are shared there, and it’s the actual decision maker that is posting it. ‘I’m looking for that rock star marketing talent. Who knows anyone? DM me.’” There is a potency in that personal approach, she says. “It’s a very intimate connection point—which helps you stand out from the pack.”

Summer’s entrepreneurial journey is rooted in journalism. At Potomac, she was the editor of The Current, part of a diverse educational experience at the school. “I was able to be a lot of different parts of myself while in high school, and I wasn’t forced to be one archetype,” she says. “That forced me to have a lot of friends from across different parts of life and really has allowed me to be a generalist—which I think helps me as a founder, because I’m comfortable wearing a lot of hats and being in a lot of different rooms.”

She went on to study journalism at Northwestern, taking on the producer role for Katie Couric after graduation, covering the 2016 election. After that, she developed new video strategies for WPIX and landed a production role at CNN but decided to go back to school when COVID struck. While getting her MBA at Columbia, she built the foundations of CollabWORK. The initial concept for the business was a gig board for the creator economy— connecting users to the global network of videographers, hair and makeup artists, and editors who work behind the scenes to power the media. “And I realized, wait, there’s already these great watering holes where people are already spending time. They’re already on these Facebook groups or reading these Slack communities or in these industry Google listservs that are referral-based and trusted—and they trust the job flow that comes from there,” says Summer. “Why am I trying to steal traffic from these places?”

Instead, she pivoted, focusing instead on the strategy of helping employers advertise their open jobs in those spaces. This new way forward for CollabWORK came into sharp relief in the fall of 2023, when the company attended a big HR tech conference in Las Vegas. “We were inundated by all these new partners who really positioned us not as a sourcing tool, but as marketing tech,” she says. Big companies, she notes, have big budgets to advertise their jobs, and they are spending it in all of the traditional spaces, where they compete in a crowded market for attention. “With us, you’re essentially bringing your jobs into these new communities, into this hidden job market that no one has access to,” she says.

AI has helped power the company’s model, analyzing job descriptions and classifying them by details like function, industry, seniority, and location. “What makes our AI really interesting is that we then match it to our communities—the newsletters, the Slack communities, the Discords, et cetera,” Summer says. It’s continually improving, too, she notes, with each click feeding the model and improving future matches.

Her journalism background has helped her grow the business. Part of it is the reporter’s mentality: When she worked in local news, she would show up at 9:00 am and have to put something on the air by 5:00 pm. “You just know you have to deliver,” she says. “And I think as a startup founder, I’ve taken [on] that mentality every day.” The willingness to get out there and mix it up helps, too. “We have to be comfortable with ambiguity. We’ve got to put ourselves out there and be vulnerable, and we have to figure it out. We’ve got to get on the phone and talk to people,” she says.

That includes investors. CollabWORK—which has grown to four core players in New York—counts female venture capitalist funder HearstLab, Sequoia Capital, and the pre-product fund 43 among its backers, and wrapped a small fundraising round in the summer and fall of 2024. Along with the nuanced model, investors also appreciate CollabWORK’s target market.

“We’re really selling to Fortune 1000 companies, not startups and other VC-backed companies,” says Summer, which means bigger talent demands and bigger budgets. “They need a ton of eyeballs and clicks and applications. They have so many jobs to fill across their functions. That’s really where we excel.”

Ultimately, success for CollabWORK, says Summer, will mean growth for both the big firms and the media communities they are  targeting. “I lived through so many layoffs—I’ve been part of that story. I felt not valuable at work—that I was just a number, and that I wasn’t reaping all the benefits,” she notes.

“And I think it’s so exciting that so many people are building either their full-time or side hustles, being really valuable by launching these professional networks and monetizing them.”

Sure, she wants to build something big—for herself, for her team, for her investors, for her customers. “But I also think that there is something about our business that’s very mission-focused, which is helping people find their next opportunity, helping companies rediscover new ways to reach talent, and helping communities find new monetization and revenue stream,” she says. “And that is really fulfilling.”

Read more stories from the The Term.