Lean vs VC: How We're Taking on StackOverflow Careers | Hacker News Reader

Lean vs VC: How We're Taking on StackOverflow Careers

blog.coderstack.co.uk

47 pointsig113 comments

To me, what's exciting & innovative about SO Careers is its integration w/ the high-quality, high-bandwidth information conveyed by SO reputations---not how SO executes the job board itself.

To me, what's exciting about SO Careers is the volume of people using it. Like all markets, you need large quantities of both buyers and sellers present to make things interesting.

In the case of SO Careers, the initial traction came from SO (which in turn got its initial traction from the readers of Jeff and Joel's respective blogs.)

Anyone wishing to compete with SO Careers better have a very good strategy for gaining traction (and not depend on the quality of the software, etc. to attract people on both sides.)

From the blog post:

it's more successful than StackOverflow Careers on most metrics in the UK. We run more job ads, our jobs get viewed by more developers, we get more applications/job and we have more satisfied customers.

Focusing on one country is probably a good way to compete against a global jobs board.

It's about attracting the right kind of listings, from a quick look it doesn't seem like their quality of listing is overly high. If I was coming to coder stack without knowing anything about the site they don't really sell me with a couple of paragraphs of about us.

I'd add a link to the blog somewhere on the page to, give a bit more of a feel for the site.

"Volume" is relative. I'm totally underwhelmed about the number of employers from my neck of the woods using SO Careers (Vancouver, Canada). It's not like there aren't a lot of high-tech companies and a solid IT scene located here. What's the deal?

The primary problem in hiring developers isn't measuring ability (although that is of course an important problem) but in sourcing candidates.

If SO can make SO Reputation the standard way of pre-filtering candidates, then there's certainly potential in that, but it doesn't seem to be what SO is focusing on.

I don't think SO Rep is really a good candidate for "the one number to rule them all" when it comes to hiring. As much as we'd like it if everyone used SO, they don't. A great majority of the users of SO never gain enough reputation to distinguish them from each other based solely on rep. You can look at the reputation distribution for SO at http://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/week/stackoverflow in the sidebar under Total Reputation. Even if we say that having 200+ rep is the signal, that's only 41K people in the world.

So if someone decides on using SO Reputation alone to qualify candidates, they can't effectively solve the primary problem of sourcing those candidates.

I sort of figured this when building Mighty CV. It's a résumé building app aimed at hackers that I've just launched. As Jason's point illustrates, I think what's most useful to potential employers is to be able to see a snapshot of activity across a broad number of relevant sites. That's why Mighty CV allows you to include stats on your résumé from StackOverflow, Github and Hacker News. You just have to supply your user id for each site when creating your résumé.

Here's what my Mighty CV résumé looks like:

http://robeastham.mightycv.com

The service is in private beta at the moment but I've just added a beta signup code in the first entry for experience in my résumé above. If this service sounds interesting to you then check then sign up for the beta. I really need as much feedback as possible at this point as I only launched the private beta yesterday.

I'm hoping to provide integration with pinboard soon so the last five posts from pinboard with the tag 'mightycv' will also automatically show up on your résumé. All Mighty CV's have an on demand PDF export feature, private cover letter URL's and a bunch of other cool stuff too. Hope you all like it.

When reading they spent money on geotargeted advertising on plenty of fish I was baffled. Decent developers or people in charge of recruiting at a company surf plenty of fish?

I had that thought as well, then realised that it's probably making sense, if Coder Stack is tracking metrics like they say they are (I get all my POF news from HN, for example).

Ven diagrammatically, I'm sure if you had a group that was unhappy with their personal life and a group unhappy with their job, there would probably be a big overlap.

People from the tech community are disproportionately represented on dating sites (if you're advertising on POF, they let you target them specifically), presumably due to the industry gender ratio and the general lack of customer interaction meaning far less dating via work occurs than in other industries.

Am I the only one who found coderstack to not be innovative at all? I went to the first job posting on the front page and I saw a 1 page job description, 1 page of skills required. It looks exactly like every other job site. I'm not trying to hate on the product, but I really don't get it. The description of the company looks like it was pulled from Crunchbase or a company's about page. The job description looks just as wordy as it would be on any other job site. And then there's a "apply now" button. Is there a piece of this puzzle that I'm missing?

The innovation is primarily in the business model and customer experience rather than in the technology which is fairly standard.

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