How about a special "Hacker News" hash that I can hide in the resume along with my profile name? So if anyone cares to find my HN profile and/or my resume, they'll just have to search for that hash+username to bring it up.
What makes one qualified?
(Personally I don't know if "Don't let lurkers solicit opportunities" is desirable but, eh, simple to implement if you decide it is.)
Also, not everyone wants their resume cached by Google, nor publicly searchable, nor have their opinions or comments traced back to whom they actually are.
The only way I can see to keep this from being abused would be to add a karma barrier. It wouldn't have to be that high (50-100?) to be a pretty good filter.
There should be a way for the top 100[0] people to flag the profile as spam which would strip them of the right to post a resume.
If I'm currently laid off and looking for a job, someone may read a smart comment I make, then notice: "hey, this guy is smart, and he is looking for a job? Let me check his profile".
If you just have the profile part, it's inefficient. When I want to hire someone, I'll keep looking at profiles of plenty of people not looking for jobs, and I'll miss the ones who could use the help. And if I browse resumes, it's not connected to their comments (at least not in context of a thread), so I don't have the impulse to like them.
An alternative would be to sort resumes by karma, but it's kind of orwellian...
But, I am afraid of a sudden influx of people posting resumes and advertising them by posting excessively. I'm not sure it's worth it. If we could prevent that, it's worthwhile. Else not.
Frankly, I'd prefer to see that in a separate site. A marker (or set of markers, for looking-for-job, looking-for-employee, looking-for-partner, etc.) by the username here would be enough. I think it'd be useful without making HN a target.
I really enjoy the 'minimalist' nature of HN profiles. They are short and sweet. I can see how opening profiles here up for more details or letting people attach resumes could provide benefits (more information being shared about each other, people getting jobs). Ultimately, its really hard to predict what will happen when new features are introduced here, but if people are landing jobs as a result, it can only be a good thing.
I'd love to see a form of official "Ask YC" category, with a subcategory of "Review my App" -- make it so it requires n karma to post to [to prevent spam] and then we can easily see what all hackers are upto.
If we can see what other users are working on -- that'll encourage us to click their profile.
Not that I would know what that's like, of course.
Now I'm going to be like Yosser and say: "Gissa job"
Looking for work by putting an asterisk next to your name when you post on Hacker News is like saying that your job search consists of watching television.
If you read Hacker News and you have free time, why on earth are you not building some kind of business? Pick some tiny problem and build a tiny, awesome solution. Do some consulting. I gotta tell you, if I were coming here looking for people to hire, it wouldn't be the people who have no hustle and expect jobs to fall out of the sky and land in their lap.
Its nice to have some sort of down time and catch up on news or other things that are interesting, even if only for a few minutes a day.