Yahoo's new social job network: Kickstart

Yahoo is looking to change the game with their new social job network, Kickstart. They are currently conducting research surveys among college students to find out what they think of this new service. Yahoo asks this question to the participants, "Wish you had an 'in' to find the job of your dreams?" Kickstart is all about finding that "in."

Yahoo Kickstart connects college students with alumni at the companies that they are interested in. As you can see in the screenshot above, this student's "in" at Nike is an alumni named Dave Bottoms. Dave has expressed an interest in helping out students and connecting with alumni. He also knows one of your friends, went to your school, and shares a common interest with you. That's a really powerful networking tool. Presenting specific connections like this adds a whole new value to this job network.

Aside from showing your "in," company pages also provide some useful information about the company as a whole, broken down into key points such as industry, size, location, contact, and description. Anyone who is connected in any way with that company is also displayed.

As you might also expect, everyone who signs up with Yahoo Kickstart gets their own profile page, where you can build a mini resume and add a quotation to give the profile a more personal feel. Everything here is pretty standard for a social network, but there is a definite professional focus, much like LinkedIn. The personal profile isn't anything revolutionary, but it certainly gets the job done in this situation.

The third and final main component to Kickstart is the university page. This is very similar to what Facebook does with their "network" pages. It displays some basic information about the school and provides space for discussions, bulletins, and events.

Yahoo Kickstart is currently a concept and is being researched, so the things that you see in these screenshots may or may not make it into the final product. When I asked Yahoo for a comment on the service, they responded by saying,

"...We're continually checking the pulse on customer response to potential concepts on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes our research leads to the development of new product offerings, but not all concepts we research are formally developed and rolled out to our larger audience."

I personally think that Kickstart is a really solid concept and that it's a possible game-changer in the professional networking space. Hopefully we'll see Yahoo kickstarting some careers in the near future.

[montipat]

iHipo.com is the pioneer in that area

http://www.iHipo.com launched late June 2007 and is sort of a pioneer for that concept: Social network + Jobsite focused on students and young professionals. After barely 2 months we were able to attract top-tier advertising clients and a good number of signups. We are currently upgrading several important parts of the site (e.g. completely revamped community section) and will introduce other new features soon. Interesting to see that Yahoo might come out with a similar concept now.

[vikqcinter]

Is there anything mind-blowing about it?

I think in order to monetize the idea, one would need to achieve a good level of integration with
1)University students database
2)Existing career sites like monster,careerbuilder
Otherwise, for me all this looks same, facebook can move towards this direction any day they fear a drop in their market share..I think this is a good risk if intelligently intergrated

[jobmatchbox]

What is Kickstart?

There was a some recent buzz about Yahoo!'s upcoming Facebook killer project called Mosh. Kickstart sounds like buzz/hype/focus group for Mosh. In any event it would be nice to have a tool that enables companies to empower their employees as agents of their college recruiting team.

Bob
Jobmatchbox.com

[piyushkotecha1]

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