It’s no big secret in the business world that’s not always what you know that lands you a job. Sometimes (probably more often than we’d like) it’s who you know that matters. But unless you’ve got connections at your dream company, getting to know someone with influence isn’t always easy.

Yahoo! thinks it might have the solution to the problem with a new social network called Kickstart.

Don’t get your hopes up just yet - Kickstart is still in research/development mode. But the product is currently being tested in a very limited capacity while Yahoo! gathers information and feedback from the early testers.

Kickstart works by attempting to connect college students to their favorite potential employers. The kicker (no pun intended) is that Kickstart makes these connections through alumni of the student’s school who also work at the company in question.

So let’s say you’re curerntly attending IMMU (that’s Internet Marketing Monitor University). You’d really like a job at Apple… but you don’t know anyone there to get your foot in the door with. Using Kickstart, you could potentially link up with IMMU alumni who are currently working at Apple.

I guess the idea is that the college becomes the common bond that ties folks together. But Kickstart also works like a traditional social network in that it shows you friends that both the college student and alumni have in common as well as hobbies, interests, etc. Combined together that could potentially be a match made in heaven… that could land you a dream job.

Yahoo! says there’s no guarantee that the service will ever see the mass public light of day. The company has tried several times to get a strong foothold in the social networking scene. But so far nothing has worked out.

Could Kickstart be the… well… kickstart… that Yahoo! needs?