By Alex Yohn
Apr 8, 2014
We need someone to contribute to Kin’s outbound sales program. We’re seeking to broaden our reach into the sub-100 employee economy, and you’ll be finding and initiating contact with these companies around the US.
More than a salesperson, you’re carrying the torch to the swath of small businesses that haven’t found Kin yet. Sometimes they don’t know the problems they’re experiencing. Other times they’re well aware. Your job is to educate them, show them some techniques, and then demonstrate how Kin can elevate their workplace.
Objectives of the job
Month 1
- Begin list generation for a single industry vertical
- Learn Kin inside out, our product roadmap, and our current customer roster.
- Write your opening pitch, write your closing pitch. Rehearse it. Now put it to the test with the Kin team.
- Work with team to learn communication cadence between opening email, demo, education/consultation, and closing.
Month 2
- Put it to the test. Start hitting your list, and sharing results with the team.
- Continue with list generation of first vertical.
- Begin list generation of second vertical, and tweak your scripts to fit the new market.
Month 3
- You’re now working two distinct verticals, closing 15-20 accounts per month of between 30-100 employees.
- Ongoing maintenance and evaluation of lists
Month 4 and beyond
You’re humming along, and provided you’re successful, we’ll take some measurements to see how much more to expand your role and outbound sales in general for our team.
What is Kin?
Kin is a hosted HR management app used by small companies to manage employee data and files, time-off, and new hire onboarding. Our mission is to make HR managers more efficient, and to delight employees with a fresh, simple interface to their workplace.
About you
- You are a starter, and a closer. We’ll work the in-betweens to provide the product support you need.
- You’re an excellent writer.
- You’ll need to adopt to the tone and culture of the Kin product. This is not cold sales by numbers. It’s teaching, persistence, and enlightenment.
- You’ll need to pull your own call/email lists.
- You’ll report directly to our Director of Client Management.
About the job
- This is a base salary plus commission job.
- You don’t need to be in Chicago. We’re happy to set you up to succeed wherever you are. You do, however, need to be in the United States and able to work here.
Interested in applying?
Below are three things we’d like you to do. Wrap them all up in an email and send them to Let.Me.In@KinHR.com.
- Tell us about your sales approach, and your past successes.
- Tell us your story, and how you think your experience will benefit Kin.
- Send along your résumé with 2 references.
By Alex Yohn
Mar 21, 2014
Last night we released a few improvements to make it easier and quicker to get users set up in Kin. They’re simple, no brainer usability tweaks that a lot of folks have been clamoring for.
Add and remove files via employee profile pages
Back in the old days, one could only share a file with an employee via the Company > Files page. That confused many, and the madness had to stop.
Now, HR Managers can open up a specific employee’s file page, and upload a new file or share an existing file right then and there. More logical. Less confusical.
Add/remove files directly via employee’s file page.
Bonus! HR Managers can also delete one or more employee files all at once via the employee’s file page. Double-rainbows.
Add and manage time-off policies via employee profile pages
In a not so distant past, the only way for HR Managers to add employees to time-off policies was via the Company > Time-Off Polices page. Again, it felt slightly backwards and unintuitive in the case where a single employee’s profile was being adjusted.
So, let there be daylight. HR Managers can now add and remove time-off polices from an employee’s time-off page. Eureka! Few clicks. Less gnashing of teeth.
Add and remove time-off policies directly to an employee via their time-off page.
Better tips for data imports
We’re learning a lot about the data import tool we released a month and change ago. Namely, how many ways we need to improve it. So, as a first few steps, we’re relaxing some of the rules Kin is enforcing when importing data, and we put a few ‘quick tips’ inline on the page to help folks get through that first crucial step a bit easier.
There are a few more improvements on the way, to be sure. This is a very important step in getting up and running with Kin. In the meantime, you can always contact us if you need help troubleshooting or you’d just like us to take care of it for you.
By Alex Yohn
Mar 13, 2014
It’s been just over eight months since Kin launched and all the hard work continues to pay off – in all sorts of ways. Not only are we helping more customers build better places to work, but we were just selected as a “HR Company to Watch” in Industry Analyst George Larocque’s new 2014 #hrwins report. Kin was recognized alongside 14 other companies for creating technology that drives innovation, delivers value to the HR industry and has true viability. We’re humbled.
Larocque spent more than 12 months conducting a comprehensive review across all different categories of HR technology and meeting with more than 150 different vendors in order to compile his results. Here’s what he had to say about Kin:
“Designed for business people, whether they are in HR or not, KinHR has developed a solution that focuses on the parts of the employee lifecycle that impact a small or medium business on a day to day basis. They deliver it via the cloud, in an easy to use interface that HR and non-HR pros alike can get up and running quickly. Until a few years ago HR Technology for companies with less than 1,000 employees was limited to payroll systems and extensions thereof. Hard to believe, when more than 95% of U.S. employment happens at firms with less than 100 employees. Even today spreadsheets or cumbersome light versions of enterprise systems are still de rigueur, when it comes to core HR for small businesses. KinHR changes that.”
We are very honored to be recognized for our hard work and it feels great to be included in such good company. If you want to learn more about Kin and the other companies being awarded, check it out here: http://www.larocqueinc.com/2014/03/11/2014-hrwins-hr-companies-to-watch.
By Alex Yohn
Feb 12, 2014
Quick Search is a super easy way to hunt, identify, and navigate to pages, files, and employees without using the traditional navigation system in Kin. Now, you just start typing, and Kin will pull up results.
Just start typing?
To start using Quick Search, just type “Control + S” on Mac or “Shift + S” on PC and it will slide open and you can get your magic on. If typing isn’t your thing, access Quick Search by clicking the magnifying glass icon in the upper-right corner of your screen.
Kin’s new quick search tool. Click the search icon in the header or use keyboard shortcut “Control + S”.
Enjoy!
As your business grows, so will your files, policies, and staff. Quick search will be there for you when sometimes it’s easier to just start typing.
By Alex Yohn
Dec 19, 2013
A year ago today, I began designing Kin. It’s easily the most involved, complex, and robust project of my career. Our team designed the application, the brand, the marketing website, assorted print collateral, banner ads; art directed multiple photoshoots; co-produced four videos and much more. As I look back on all this work and the past year, a handful of lessons stand out.
1) Find the brand by getting to know the product.
When I first started designing Kin, the goal was just to provide enough runway for the development team to continue building the application. Despite what design school thought, Step 1 wasn’t creating a cool logo and a brand standards guide. By the time we got around to designing the brand identity four months later, we had four more months of conversation about Kin under our belt, a lot of UI design decisions made, and we felt like we were starting to get to know Kin’s personality and quirks. The identity design still took a lot of effort, but it came together in a way that felt natural and right for our product because we didn’t force or rush it.
2) Feature-based Design < System-based Design
Tactically, our team approached the design of the Kin UI on a feature by feature basis. We’d spend a week or two working on the Files portion of the app, and then move on to the Onboarding section, then Tasks, etc. Now this worked on a getting-things-done level, however, it’s left a bit of a hodgepodge, case-by-case-basis impact on the UI. Since the initial release in July, we’ve been improving our designs to make them more systematic and consistent across the entire app and less arbitrary.
As we move forward with the UI design we’re thinking less about specific features and more about establishing, refining, and carefully adding to a design language. We find ourselves asking, “How have we previously solved this problem or a problem like it?” Often times, the best answer for new design challenges is a design pattern we’re already using elsewhere.
3) Design actually is a differentiator.
We hypothesized that design, both visual and user experience, would help differentiate Kin from the competition. Many designers assume if it’s the pretty option within an ugly field people will come running. I’d say we hoped that’d be true, but it was still a gamble. I mean the HR-space doesn’t have a history of being particularly visually-discerning. But five months after our public release, we can affirm with confidence design is a key differentiator between us and our competitors. While we work toward feature parity, we find that our customers come to use Kin for it’s simplicity of use, attention to detail, and visual beauty.
Our hope was that the discipline, craft, and thinking we poured into the design would somehow translate tangibly to the end users. And to our immense joy, it seems to have. Plus, we’re finding that the same people that care about design are often the same ones who care about designing better workplaces for their employees.
4) Designing an app is a lot easier than designing a business.
I had hoped when we released Kin in July, we’d be greeted with the warm embrace of the market, quickly come to dominate all competition, and enjoy all the spoils of winning. It turns out designing an app is a lot easier than designing a profitable, self-sustaining business. We learned a lot about designing user interfaces and product design in the first half of 2013. Now we’re learning even more about optimizing for product market fit, A/B testing, sales, and content strategy.
Designing a great product was a big step. But we’re working to design a successful and thriving business by getting Kin into the hands of more companies that will love it.
The Next Year of Designing Kin
2013 has been a great year for our small, but mighty, product design team. The public release in July was a major milestone, but it wasn’t a finish line. I often like to think of Kin now as the ugliest, dumbest, worst designed version in a long and steady line of iteration and improvement. But when I look back on other more famous version 1.0 releases, I feel pretty satisfied with what we’ve accomplished thus far. Yet, any satisfaction is short-lived because I know how much work remains. I can’t wait to see what 2014 holds for Kin, our team, and most importantly our users, and I can’t wait for you to see it too.
By Alex Yohn
Dec 17, 2013
The new employee import tool is a great way to get up and running with an app that was already, well, really easy to get up and running.
Instead of adding employees one-by-one, Kin now gives you an Excel template to download, populate, and then upload back into Kin. Once the employee profiles are imported, you can review and spot check the data and add the imported employees to time-off policies and files, all before actually inviting them to sign in to Kin for the first time.
Here’s how it works:
1. Visit the Manage Team page, and click “Import Employees” in the top right corner. Download the Excel template to get started.
The new and improved Import Employees page
2. Open the Excel template, populate a few required fields, then add additional data as you like. Kin will include any custom fields you’ve created in your account so you can pre-populate those too.
Populate the Employee Import spreadsheet in Excel
3. Once you’ve collected all of your data in the Excel file, upload it back into Kin. Kin will let you know whether the data is valid or if you need to make some tweaks. If there’s any error, an annotated Excel file will automatically download, pointing out the data that needs to be fixed. If this happens, you can choose to import all employees with correctly formatted data, or continue the cycle until everyone’s data has passed muster.
Kin lets you know if your data is formatted properly.
4. Once you’ve successfully imported your employee’s data into Kin, you can choose to send invitations to anyone or everyone in just a few clicks. Or, you can go off and spot check a few profiles first to make sure everything looks good. Your choice. The “Invite Employees” feature will be available whenever you’re ready. Note: your account isn’t charged for any employees until they’ve actually signed in to Kin, so take as much time as you need.
Send all the invites when you’re ready.
We’re excited to make you and your team’s lives that much easier. As always, you can still add employees one-by-one, but this should be a huge time saver for anyone looking to get their whole team into Kin quickly.