Another week, another new job site touting the end of Monster. Meet Zapoint.
Zapoint lets job seekers map out their professional and personal achievements on a patented LifeChart™, converting accomplishments into a quantifiable format and creating a standard currency to help employees get a better handle on where they stand amongst their peers (and their competition). Even better, employers are able to instantly whittle down their candidate pool to only the most qualified candidates. So, whether you’re curious if other software programmers in the Austin, Texas area are CISCO certified, or if there’s a candidate in Des Moines, Iowa that’s also a fierce hockey player, Zapoint provides the answers.
Anyone else longing for the days when new sites just offered job listings?
Like, what’s a LifeChart? According to the site, “After you have entered your resume information into our system we generate a LifeChart™ for candidates; this is like a stock chart of your life. This is a graphical representation that will show progress across professional, educational and personal achievements – your ‘second resume.’ This is just the start of your journey into how Zapoint can help you manage your career.”
Get it? Me neither.
The site looks to combine elements of Web 2.0, particularly social networking and tagging, integrating some sort of mentor / mentee hierarchy. Publicizing the most popular tags of users on the homepage could be risky, as most of them represent non-U.S. locations, which is sure to scare away a lot of employers who are sick of resumes from distant places.
Marketing the site seems to rely heavily on word-of-mouth. They’re giving away $1,000 sign-on bonuses to job seekers and free iPods for recruiting new users. They have a Facebook application as well. Learn more about the executives here. They are heavy on technology and light on the Internet recruiting – historically not a great combination. A recruiter’s area is coming soon.
For more – and hopefully make sense of it all – checkout their entertaining Flash presentation. (Gotta love the “300″ reference.) I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but working on the whole keep it simple thing might be a good idea for this newbie. Check it out and decide for yourself.
Popularity: 4% [?]
October 29th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
This is possibly the most incoherent concept I’ve ever seen trotted out into an over-crowded market. I hope no one spends too much time embellishing their credentials in the hopes of producing a stunning “Life Chart” that NO ONE WILL EVER LOOK AT!
October 29th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
It’s just boredom
October 29th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
I’m Chris, Founder of Zapoint. We appreciate any feedback you have as we’re still in the very early stages with our Company. Your points are well taken. Let me try and sum up our value in a few sentences. We quantify a member’s resume. Why? Because comparing 200 resumes for any vacancy is a subjective and inefficient task. We have built an algorithm that quantifies achievement to tackle these two issues. Our LifeChart is just the starting point of the analysis that we provide both the member and ultimately the recruiter. It is a “2 second resume”. There is much more beyond that on the site and I would urge you to sign in to see for yourself, as many new members are doing.
We are a career management tool that should be used in conjunction with job boards like monster. We do not see us replacing ‘the monster’, rather a tool like this will only enhance a member’s job seeking capabilities and put them in control. The only confusion I see is why word document resumes still exist?
Imagine, as a recruiter, being able to select candidates that have ranked and segmented themselves into career territories? Wouldn’t that be a refreshing Monday morning experience?
If this still sounds unclear, I’m happy to respond to any specific questions or comments you or your readers might have.
October 29th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
What happened to constructive criticism? What does “It’s just boredom” mean???? The site looks pretty interesting to me.
October 29th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
While I agree with cheezwhiz on zapoint keeping things simple, and sharpening their value proposition, this company does in my opinion have potential. I’ve worked in recruitment for many years, and the goal remains the same – find a pool of right people, including passive hidden talent and match to the jobs you have. Having candidates ranked according to career segments makes sense to me, as does linking professional network connections in context of resume entries.
Be interesting to see what they release for recruiters and what business model they adopt.
November 1st, 2007 at 4:45 pm
It looks to me like Chris asked two of his friends to support his product on the blog comments.