Getting your kicks(tarters)
| Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 | --Sean |
It's been a while since I've played with Kickstart -- honestly, it's just because I haven't been looking for a job and therefore haven't needed to leverage my connections! And I'm also not looking for a job now! Man, it's hard to talk about recruiting social networks without digging yourself into a hole.
One of the greatest assets of Kickstart, as it was first described to me, was the way that it was intended to help you navigate your network to figure out the best people to connect to if you were looking for a job or looking for more information about a company. Kickstart hasn't quite taken off yet, but they have added in that concept of trying to figure out the best people to talk to based on your affiliations. Whenever you see a profile, you'll also see a little meter next to the user's picture indicating how similar you are, tying in which schools you've gone to, where you've worked, if you're friends, etc. Whenver you conduct a search for a company, school, or affiliation, you'll be presented with a ranked list of Kickstarters, indicating how likely those people would be to kickstart you into that company/school/affiliation, letting you know who you ought to befriend right away. You're also presented on the homepage with people with whome you might want to connect, based on how much you have in common. It's still pretty rudimentary, but it's getting towards that vision of what Kickstart can really help you achieve, which I've always been absolutely in love with.