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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Zapoint for career management

Something called zapoint.com has launched as a new tool for career management.

It's basically a site to create a free online resume. They call this tool a LifeChart and they want to give you $1,000 bucks if you find a job through them. The interface is slick and they appear to have some VC money and advisers including a former member of MIT. Learn more about them here.

The LifeChart is an actual graphical representation that is supposed to show your career progress. I'm not sure job seekers or recruiters will understand it. For my money, sites like LinkedIn are already become the defacto digital resume for professionals. And Jobster already has things like tags which Zapoint seems to rely heavily on.

I don't see anything here which says they will succeed. It's already a very crowded market and the leaders in this space are miles ahead.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I’m Chris, Founder of Zapoint. Thank you for taking time to look at us. 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”. We also ask members to stake out their career territory.

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?

Take a look at my zapoint resume:

www.zapoint.com/resumes/mallard

If this still sounds unclear, I’m happy to respond to any specific questions or comments you or your readers might have.