FAQ

Kanso is a career trade-off profiling tool that shows you what you'd actually protect and sacrifice in a professional role - not what you think you should want.

The tool works by asking you to rate and rank 20 factors across four areas: culture, professional fit, personal life, and compensation. The result is a personalised trade-off profile: a clear hierarchy of what matters most to you, where your current role is working, and where it isn't.

Kanso is built for:

• Individual contributors who feel something is off in their current role but can't quite name it
• Job seekers and career changers who want to evaluate opportunities against what they actually need - not just salary and title
• Anyone who has made a sensible career decision that still didn't quite add up

You don't need to be unhappy at work to benefit. Kanso is equally useful if you're thriving and want to understand why, or if you're weighing a new offer and need a clear framework to evaluate it honestly.

Kanso is not a personality test. It does not assign you a type, a colour, a four-letter code, or an archetype.

Most personality tools tell you what kind of person you are. Kanso tells you what trade-offs you're actually making - and whether those trade-offs are ones you've consciously chosen or ones that quietly happened to you.

The key difference is the credit allocation mechanism. You are given a limited number of credits to distribute across your priorities. Because you cannot give everything a top score, the tool forces genuine prioritisation. The result reflects your real hierarchy, not an idealised version of it.

The assessment takes approximately five minutes and has four stages:

1. Reflect - Rate 20 factors across culture, professional fit, personal life, and compensation. This surfaces how you currently feel about each area.
2. Rank - Allocate a limited number of credits across your highest-rated factors. Because credits are finite, you cannot mark everything as a non-negotiable. This is where your real hierarchy emerges.
3. Reveal - Receive your personalised trade-off profile: what you would protect, what you would compromise on, where tensions exist between competing priorities, and where your current role is misaligned.
4. Ask - Unlock Kanso Coach, an AI-powered virtual coaching interface that is personalised to your results.

The credit system is the core of how Kanso works.

After rating your 20 factors, you are given a fixed number of credits to assign across them. You cannot allocate maximum credits to everything - the budget forces you to choose what genuinely comes first.

This matters because most people, when asked to rate career factors in isolation, score nearly everything highly. The credit system removes that option. It surfaces the hierarchy you actually hold, rather than the one you believe you should hold. The tension between what you rated highly and what you were willing to spend credits on is often where the most useful insight sits.

A trade-off profile is the personalised output you receive after completing the Kanso assessment. It includes:

• Your priority hierarchy - a ranked view of what matters most to you across culture, compensation, professional fit, and personal life
• Your non-negotiables - the factors you would refuse to compromise on, and the tensions between them that most roles cannot fully resolve
• Your compromise zone - the factors you rated highly but were willing to trade away, which often reveals where unconscious compromises are being made
• Strategic recommendations - practical actions you can take now, from adjusting how you structure your work to conversations worth having with your manager
• Deep-dives - for each non-negotiable, a breakdown of the upside when it's right, the cost when it isn't, and specific questions worth raising in your next role or review

Your trade-off profile is specific to how you actually function. It is not a generic career framework applied to your answers - it reflects your particular hierarchy.

Kanso Coach is an AI-powered virtual coaching interface that unlocks after you complete your assessment. It is trained on your trade-off profile, which means every conversation is grounded in your specific results - not generic career advice.

You can use Kanso Coach to:

• Understand why a particular driver matters so much to you
• Explore what to do about a friction point in your current role
• Evaluate whether a role you are considering is actually a fit for your hierarchy
• Prepare for a conversation with your manager about what you need
• Work through a career decision you are finding hard to make

Kanso Coach is not a chatbot with scripted responses. It uses a large language model (LLM) to reason about your specific profile and respond to your actual situation.

Yes. Kanso does not sell your data or share it with third parties. Your assessment results are used solely to generate your trade-off profile and power your Kanso Coach conversations.

Full details are available in the Privacy Policy.

Yes. Kanso is free to use during early access. No credit card is required at any point.

The assessment takes approximately five minutes. There are 20 questions across two stages - rating and credit allocation - followed by your results.

After completing the assessment you receive:

• A full trade-off profile personalised to your results
• A ranked view of your key drivers and non-negotiables
• Analysis of tensions between competing priorities
• Strategic recommendations and concrete next steps
• Deep-dives into each of your non-negotiables
• Access to Kanso Coach, an AI coaching interface personalised to your profile

Your profile is available immediately after you complete the assessment.

Yes. Kanso is not only for people who are unhappy or actively looking to leave.

If you are happy in your current role, Kanso can help you understand why - which factors are being met, and what your employer is getting right. That kind of clarity is useful for evaluating future opportunities, negotiating for what you need, or simply understanding what to protect.

Yes. Kanso is particularly useful when you are evaluating new roles, because your trade-off profile gives you a clear framework to assess any opportunity against.

Rather than reacting to each role on its own terms - salary here, culture there - you can measure it against your actual hierarchy. That makes it easier to spot roles that look good on paper but are likely to leave you in the same position you started.

No. Kanso is a self-assessment tool and AI coaching interface, not a replacement for a qualified human career coach.

What it does offer is structured self-reflection and an AI interface that can help you explore your results in depth. For many people, that is a useful starting point - or a way to get more out of a coaching relationship by arriving with greater clarity about their own priorities.

Kanso was built by Steve Tapley, a product leader and software engineer based in Perth, Western Australia. Steve has spent 30 years building software, with the last decade working at the intersection of technology and people strategy in the SME space.

The tool came out of a problem Steve kept seeing: smart, capable professionals who knew something was off in their career but could not name it precisely enough to act on it. Kanso is the tool he kept wishing existed.

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn →