Networking service for college students dubbed as “KickStart,” that link prospective candidates find their dream job.
Rather than follow the dominance of Facebooko or MySpace, Yahoo appears to trying to create a LinkedIn-style network for recent graduates looking for a fast track to viable employment.
Yahoo Kickstart let users to maintain online profiles pages which are focused on the user’s resume, and can link to groups representing prospective employers.
According to Harrison Hoffman over at CNet, who got a look at the potential new service, seems impressed by what Yahoo has done in trying to offer students a way to present themselves to employers.
Corporations and wannabe employers are then provided with groups that users can join, but with a catch: to join a company group first they need to receive an invite from a former student who works at that company.
Yahoo’s three-fold concept:
- First, connect students with alumni of their schools who work for the company the student is interested in — that is the main social networking aspect.
- The second portion of KickStart is the usual profile page, but in this case the profile is tweaked to act as an informal resume, similar to LinkedIn.
- The final part of KickStart, for those users who would prefer something a little more social, is the University pages, which is a bit like a Facebook “network” pages, are open to all students and include discussion forums, bulletins and events.
The site provides a clean slated approach to profile creation. Lately, there have been a number of services coming up centered on the social networking concept.
“Yahoo has been trying to deal itself in to the hot social networking space for some time, but with little or no success.”
While Yahoo KickStart is currently a concept and may or may not see the light of day, it highlights Yahoo’s ongoing efforts to gain some traction in the hot social networking space, something they failed to achieve with their Yahoo 360 blogging come social networking product.
Yahoo! has been working hard at expanding its social networking profile, with attempts to acquire FaceBook. There were even rumors that Yahoo was trying to buy Bebo in May.
More recently Yahoo was rumored to be working on a social networking product by the name of Yahoo Mosh.
Kickstart is being tried as a concept, and there are no confirmations of it coming out as a separate product yet. With social networking increasingly opening up new avenues for garnering online attention, will Yahoo! be able to make definite inroads?
Yahoo told News.com there in guarantee the concept will bear fruit. “Not all concepts we research are formally developed and rolled out to a larger audience,” a spokesperson said.