StackOverflow is hugely relevant to hiring decisions - their biz model? | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow is hugely relevant to hiring decisions - their biz model?

2 pointsaresant7 comments

As we all know StackOverflow is on the road raising money.

Lots of the discussion in the HN boards focused on why they need more $$$, and what about their model scaled.

Here’s my best guess: in our ongoing odyssey to hire a few add’l great programmers I’ve found myself relying more and more on StackOverflow to decide who to spend time interviewing.

They also have a $500 a month premium access option for hiring managers to sift through candidates.

Unlike linkedin, which let’s candidates kiss their own asses, StackOverflow lets you really get a sense for who you’re hiring, what their skills are, what their problem solving skills are, and find the BEST candidates, as reviewed by their peers.

This is an ingenious way to qualify talent and could be scaled in many other industries.

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I love the /idea/ of using StackOverflow Careers to identify and retain talent. But there just aren't enough candidates there to justify the $1000/month fee.

You used to be able to see the number of candidates that would be returned for specific searches without paying for an employer account. A recent search for Ruby developers in the DFW area came back with only 5-10 hits. I can no longer find the search page. I wonder why?

So, if someone is not a member of this one particular Q&A board site, you aren't interested in hiring them?

First, it's not "this one particular Q&A board" IMO - StackOverflow is now in the top 600 largest sites on the web, and the central hub for programming discussion.

I would consider somebody else if they gave a sufficiently compelling reason, but again when making the decision about where to focus time (think 20 - 30 resumes a day coming in) it's an easy way to qualify people.

I've made over 20,000 posts in programming forums, most of which have been around a decade or more, but none at Stack Overflow. Filtering resumes by having an account at a single specific site, no matter how popular that site, is rather arbitrary.

As for "Filtering resumes by having an account at a single specific site. . . is rather arbitrary":

I never in my post say that's the only mechanism we use to qualify - we get candidates from all over the usual candidates (monster / cb / hotjobs / dice / etc) but we use SO to help qualify.

I see lots of value in SO when trying to filter through the HUGE amount of resumes that come through the door.

I hire lots of technical people, this system works for me.

Their business model is charging $500/month to hiring managers for access to candidates and slapping in some advertising.

The fact that they’re out on the road raising VC says that they’re probably having a lot of success in this model because it works for others too.

StackOverflow centralizes, VERY VERY SUCCESSFULLY, a huge talent pool of programmers.

And it gives hiring managers a lot of data that is hard to collect (multiplied x30 resumes a day) from a variety of “programming forums” to make hiring decisions.

Are you hiring people to support your developers or are you hiring developers? I am sure a lot of people answering questions on SO are great developers, just as I am equally sure that there are more great developers out there working on software that have never answered a SO question.

If SO really becomes the Go To place for background checking a job applicant's skill, people's posts on it will just become more self-serving. Instead of posting to genuinely find something out, you post a question for the sake of trying to appear smart.

It reminds me of a college course I'm taking. The other day we had someone filming a documentary shoot some of the class. The discussion that day was as vibrant as ever. Everybody wanted to survive the cutting room floor, including me.

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