Folks,
I wanted to update everyone on our recent changes.
We’ve been continually working on making our site easier to use, and more mobile friendly. We’ve tested against most popular mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Samsung etc), however if yours doesn’t work please let us know!
Even though we’re based in Silicon Valley California, we get visitors from all over the world. In particular we decided to support Spanish because our members asked us to. If you’d like to see kinzaa.com in your language, please let us know.
We realized over time that employers wanted a place on the Internet as well. Now, if you’re an employer or a business, you can create a Kinzaa profile for your business. If you are hiring, you can create job postings and share them over social media just like you would a resumé.
Please note that resumés will always be free! Employer profiles will also be free. Job postings will cost an introductory fee of 25 USD.
Elevator Pitch
The classic definition of an elevator pitch (or an elevator speech) is to describe yourself, your product or service to someone within the span of an elevator ride. This means your elevator pitch needs to be summarized to someone within thirty seconds or a minute. For our friends from Commonwealth nations, an elevator is the same as a lift.
In your Kinzaa profile, the “Description” field at the top right of your “Edit Profile” page is provided for your elevator pitch. We have restricted this to 3000 characters. All the hiring managers we’ve talked to have said they want to see short and direct pitches, so our recommendation is to keep it short.
Here are some examples of elevator pitches that can go into your “Description” field. All are from existing members of Kinzaa:
This is a wonderful one from a teacher:
Helping develop lifelong learners and passionate readers.
From a technical marketing engineer:
I work at the intersection of business and technology, bringing innovative products to market.
Here is a longer one which I like as well:
I am a seasoned sales and marketing professional with management experience. My background has been molded through years of proven success while in the employ of some of the largest and most influential organizations. I also possess a business mentality and prowess which is a product of the Bachelor’s in Business degree that I have earned as well as from my roles in management and sales. My current objective is to utilize my experience and background for a company that offers opportunities for growth by achieving the company’s business goals and expectations.
The key here is to get someone reading your description interested enough to move on to read the rest of your profile. You don’t want to sound desperate. You definitely don’t want to put someone reading your description to sleep by having it be super-long.
Keep it positive, and keep it short.
Good luck!
What are my skills?
As we’ve mentioned in our FAQ, research has shown that for a perfect job match, the following four items matter:
a. Skills
b. Experience
c. Personality
d. Objectives
We have built Kinzaa around these four factors. I’m going to write about these four items in more detail, starting with skills first.
If you want to get a job, it goes without saying that you need to have the skills to perform. Your potential employer is going to look for recruits or job-seekers with certain skills. You, the job-seeker need to highlight those skills.
Kinzaa has been designed to allow recruits to find their perfect job. When you fill out the skills section of your profile, think very carefully about what you are good at. If you are a new grad, don’t fret; you still have skills. Think about the skills you gained in class. If you took courses in literature, perhaps critical thinking is your forte. Analysis, writing. These are great skills to have.
If you were a computer science student, then your skills might be in the various computer languages such as C++, Python, etc. Don’t forget about the skills you learned while you doing summer jobs or internships as well. These are very important and employers pay a lot of attention to these. What were you doing the summer of your junior year? What did you learn? If you worked at the local mall, then how about customer service?
Skills are the most important thing a potential employer is looking for, which is why it is highlighted on your Kinzaa infographic resumé. Please take the utmost care in filling these out.
Good luck!
Questions or comments? Please let us know.
EDIT: Found another great article here on transferable skills. Please consider this before creating your infographic profile on Kinzaa.
Why we are data driven
Recently, Erica Swallow wrote a great article about some simple tools to create Infographic resumés. We were very happy that she mentioned Kinzaa as well. We like Erica for two reasons:
1. She “gets it” about infographic resumés. Most of us don’t ride horse-drawn buggies any more. Why then do we continue writing (or trying to write) text resumés?
2. Erica was one of the first people to create her profile on Kinzaa (even though we are in beta) and graciously gave us her feedback. Go Erica!
There are quite a few infographic resumé Websites springing up these days. There is a reason why. Unemployment is sky-high, and job-seekers want and need ways to stand out in the crowd. A lot of these Websites offer different themes, customizations and so on. Its a lot of fun to try these out.
We’ve taken a different approach. We’ve been thinking about this problem for years, and in fact count a PhD (with a Human Resources specialization) amongst one of our advisers.
Let’s explain our approach with an example. If you looked at my text resumé or my online profile, you’d see that I had years of experience in Linux, networking, systems programming and so on. You might think I’d be a perfect candidate to go work for any large technology multinational. In fact nothing could be further from the truth .
You see, my plain old profile, whether its text-based or infographic, doesn’t indicate that I prefer working in small teams at smaller companies. It doesn’t indicate that I like working with interesting new products and that I like a certain amount of risk and challenge.
This is why Kinzaa has taken a data-driven approach. Yes we want job-seekers to be able to highlight their skills in an easy manner. But we also want employers to get a complete idea of the job-seeker in one glance.
Infographics really is just a tool for us to get there.