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Comment by rattray | Hacker News Reader

One interesting nugget: more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers.

Has anyone used SO Careers? Opinions?

I posted a employer ad on SO Careers, and also GitHub Jobs. The SO post resulted in a satisfyingly large set of high-quality candidates. I was satisfied with the value.

In contrast, GitHub was surprisingly disappointing. Maybe one or two worthwhile candidates, and a ton of junk. It appears that GitHub's jobs get scraped and posted elsewhere, and the bulk of responses to my ad were low-quality (and that's being generous) candidates responding to those reposted versions.

Interesting theory. What prevents other sites from scraping SO posts? If the answer is "nothing", that suggests it's just a matter of time until it's just as bad. Right?

I'm not sure, as I didn't dig too deeply. I forget the details, but I knew the post had been reposted, since many of the (poor quality) candidates said things like "I'm inquiring about the position posted at [some-place-other-than-github]"

The answer is nothing, I get plenty of applicants who have come from elsewhere.

But SO do make it easy to detect applicants from SO by linking to their profile.

In theory the community moderation element forces a user to cite their sources or face the backlash of deletion/downvoting, etc.

Used it as both an employer and job-seeker, and have been very happy on both sides.

As an employer, application quality was fantastic - for 3 different technical roles, a majority of applicants in the final round of interviewing, and the eventual hires themselves, all came from Stack Overflow.

Also, the cost was a lot lower. Typical cost from a recruitment agency would be around £3-5K for a junior developer, £5-10K for a mid-level developer. StackOverflow was £250. The results from StackOverflow were also better - the recruitment agency sent Java developers for JavaScript roles, and all those usual horror stories. The only advantage of the agencies was that they found more applicants, but typically, they sent more chaff than wheat.

Sorry if it sounds like I work for the PR team, but if you're looking to hire I can't see the downside of advertising on StackOverflow.

I had a great experience about 3 years ago. It was amazing.

First, SO Careers 1.0 came to a halt, they made a few changes in 2.0, they changed it to an invite-only system as opposed to a premium subscription service. They best part of all, they reimbursed everyone who had previously paid. Here was the blog post about it: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/careers-2-0-launches/

It was great, I was getting several requests per week for a while, and it even helped me land a job across the country.

All that being said, I haven't kept my SO Careers profile up to date lately, and haven't had many inquiries in a while.

I do highly recommend it.

Is it important to have high SE rep points for getting noticed from recruiters?

(I have started using recently, have only 1k rep)

That is actually (surprisingly) not made super prominent on a users profile page. There is a place to list questions/answers that you felt were good representations of your skill/knowledge

Not really. The usual guidelines are "have a portfolio of some sort" - IOW, something you can use to demonstrate what you know instead of just leaning on a sad list of keywords. That can be a nice SO profile, but could also be a solid open source project or well-written blog.

If you do plan on showing off your SO profile, don't get hung up on rep - well-written answers that demonstrate mastery of a subject are a lot more useful than an arbitrary number.

I got my first job out of college via SO Careers; it was a pretty solid gig, though I've moved on since then. I think I applied to several jobs through it, and wound up with a few phone screens leading to one actual interview in person. The response rate was pretty good; in fact, the only slow response I've had was when I applied for a job at Trello, but that was probably due to them being swamped more than anything else.

I've found that it's quite a good source of information on legitimately good or interesting technology companies in various cities. Once you look outside Silicon Valley, it can sometimes be surprisingly hard to figure out what the good companies are, if any, in a given city. My experience is that the good companies typically have at least a profile or job posting on there.

(And if you're a good company and you have neither of those, I recommend getting one if you can afford it -- not sure what the cost is.)

Creating a company page is free: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/products/company-pages

It's pretty good, as a programmer I ditched Linkedin a while ago, I always get great opportunities from SO Careers, and always get spam (pretty much) and shitty opportunities from Linkedin, just being there, without actively applying to jobs.

To any of the people who have had some success with SO Careers — are you in Europe / Germany?

I get remarkably few contacts on Careers compared to other sources, and then often from people who completely ignored my location (back when I was marked as "no relocation"). Friends who I gave invites to didn't seem to get anywhere with SO.

Also, it's still the case that searching for a postal code on the German version of the site (as it suggests, in German, in the search field) will assume you meant a US zipcode.

We're looking into the zip code issue, stay tuned.

The zip code issue should now be fixed.

E.g. try "76131" on the German site and you'll see jobs/companies in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Do the same search on the U.S. and you'll see results from Fort Worth, TX.

I kept my profile there for a while from 2011-2012 and at the time I didn't get any leads. When I actively searched for job postings there, they mostly seemed to be within a few core areas, usually aligning with the same things Stack Overflow proper has a lot of activity in: .NET, enterprise Java, etc.

As a web developer working in stuff like PHP or Ruby, I just chalked it up to me being in the wrong venue. Over time, I've gotten better leads and interviews from stuff like We Work Remotely and even Indeed. From my experience, the stuff SO Careers was optimizing for and prioritizing on profile pages wasn't really important for landing an interview request.

All that said, a lot can change in 2 years and it seems SO Careers's success somewhat speaks for itself.

2 reasons for this:

1 - It generates 2/3 of the money.

2 - It probably requires the most handholding from Sales and Customer Support. There's only so much scaling they can do.

I found my current job, which is working on SO Careers, on SO Careers.

yay! me too!

I knew your alias sounded familiar...

And I found my current job a Trello there. I wanted a remote dev position and spent a few months getting an RSS feed of remote jobs from SO -- it was, by far, the highest quality of my sources.

I've been hired through SO Careers and also hired 1 developer through it. Neither was through a job posting - both were through using their candidate search service.

Posted my opinions here a few months ago: http://noxad.com/technical/hiring-using-careers-2-0-stackove...

I tried to use it a little over a year ago when I was looking for my next gig. I got a couple decent leads out of it, but no real interviews. It seemed not to really have reached a point of "critical mass" yet where there were a lot of good listings available. It seems to have marginally more promise than the rest of the things of its breed, but it did not change my mind that finding a job through (even casual) acquaintances (which is what I ended up doing) is much more effective. The half hour it takes to set up a profile would be much better spent going to your local dev Meetup if you only had a half hour to spend IMHO. That being said, it seems to collect "all the right info" and I go back and update it every once in a while.

Yes we hired through SO Careers and have been very satisfied with the result. You need to spend a lot of time crafting your job offer and should not be afraid to take the premium package but it is worth it.

The staff has been very helpful with giving us great tips to improve our offer.

I've used it both as a Job Seeker and employer.

As an employer, we got no real prospects, only a few people who were looking for remote work, even though the description said local only. They gave us a full refund with no hassle under their satisfaction guaranteed policy.

As an employee, it brought to my attention a great job from a good local company that actually cared about developers and allows remote work.

Relatively happy with it from both sides.

I would guess most of those employees will be in sales / account management where the job would be to develop relationships with businesses to post jobs on StackOverflow. For example, look here [1].

[1] https://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=Job...

In my experience (speaking from the employer point of view), SO Careers has been pretty good. Most of the people who applied were looking to work remotely (which was fine by us), so that might skew the experience (as in, not sure what the response quality would be if we didn't select "remote work ok" given that most of our respondents wanted to work remotely).

Interesting, which is why the blog post above went on about the careers side of things.

I'm sure $40 million would help to push out their Q&A side of things, but looks like they want to spend it on the careers side of things?

I hope they get back those 100,000+ job postings :P.

Their careers business has the opportunity to be a revenue generator for the company. The starting cost for a job listing is $495 per 30 days and goes up to $1499 per 30 days. In my opinion, the profiles on Stack Overflow careers allow developers to present themselves much better than many other career sites.

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/products/listings

$495? Wasn't it just about $350 not too long ago?

We changed prices in December. Market conditions right now are tough; we’re seeing more frequently that it’s unrealistic to expect to hire a developer in 30 days given that for every developer there are 4-5 jobs. We’re optimizing our products and pricing to encourage customers to allow listings to run a longer on the site. To make this feel like the right decision for our customers, we’re significantly discounting our 60 and 90 day listings. That said, if you’ve been using Stack Overflow Careers for a while and want to keep buying 30-day job listings for $350, that’s fine too. (I'm on the marketing team, btw)

I got approached by an employer through SO careers. We went for few rounds and got the offer. But I ended up taking another offer with better compensation.

I've had a profile there for a while and prefer it over LinkedIn because it's (obviously) more developer focused. It's also less spammy than LinkedIn in terms of being contacted by recruiters/agencies.

That said, LinkedIn still takes up the majority of what little time I spend on sites like these since that's where most people are.

I posted a decent programming job in a decent market on there about a year ago, but didn't get any qualified applicants.

Stack Exchange is to Jobs postings as Facebook is to Advertising.

Both have massive potential audience, but both don't deliver engagement and effectively eat your budget.

Facebook isn't largely effective (in part) because the audience isn't there to be advertised to, their busy socializing with friends/family. Stack Exchange isn't effective as a Job Bulletin because the audience isn't there to find a job (they probably already have one), they're there to get assistance for a problem.

Yeah, exactly! People watch TV for entertainment. TV ads don't work.

> Yeah, exactly! People watch TV for entertainment. TV ads don't work.

TV ads are often entertaining, and you don't have to go out of your way to view them (you usually don't have a choice). Ads on Facebook and other sites are often seen as intrusive and usually ignored. In the case of Stack Exchange's Careers page, you have to explicit go to it to view the listings.

Very different things.

TV ads are fun to watch, huh? Maybe, depends on a lot of variables.

On facebook ads - the best FB ads are native to facebook. Pictures or videos. You don't need to go to another site. They are interesting and draw the viewer's attention just like good TV (any) ads. You have the added benefit of instant social proof and maybe even clicks to your site, if you included a shortened link somewhere. Don't confuse FB ads with adwords or direct response banner advertising. It is not. People who treat it this way are the same people who complain it doesn't work.

> Don't confuse FB ads with adwords or direct response banner advertising. It is not. People who treat it this way are the same people who complain it doesn't work.

I'm not. My company has gone through no less than 3 different marketing agencies that believed they could "do social right", and we've given it our own go internally as well. None succeed in doing anything but getting more likes on our FB page and draining our marketing budget. People simply did not click through to the website nor convert into purchases. After FB's algorithm change to synthetic feeds, well, it got even worse.

You might say "well, you've used the wrong social marketing company!"... and that's exactly what they all said when they pitched us.

Our story is not unique. Perhaps it depends on the types of products, etc, but there have been some very high profile mega-corps that very publicly yanked their FB ad support citing similar reasons.

Adwords and other direct banner adverts, on the other hand, do work, and they work very well. One possibility they work so well is the user is already looking for a product that is then pitched to them, ie. browsing a how-to forum and then gets presented with products that the how-to uses.

They are very different beasts.

Seems wrong to me. By that logic there ought to be a place for people to go specifically for viewing advertising; no such place exists.

> there ought to be a place for people to go specifically for viewing advertising; no such place exists.

There are plenty. It's about a captive audience. Take a movie theater for example -- you don't have a choice but to sit there and if not look at it, you hear the ads. Same if you're trying to watch at TV show, you have no choice.

Things like DVR have changed that partially and reduced the effectiveness of TV adverts; a major reason why broadcasting companies have fought hard against being able to fast-forward through commercials, etc. You can always show up late to the movie theater too, but most don't and it's not as convenient.

Other examples would be the newspaper classified's sections (or craigslist being the online version). People go and look there specifically to be sold to.

The point being, if your audience isn't captive, or if they aren't already interested in your product, then your adverts are wasted effort (and money).

When's the last time you were on FB and saw a sidebar ad for Coors Light and decided to run out and buy some? What about a car advert? Vacuum cleaner? Probably never. Maybe you liked their FB page, but it likely didn't result in a conversion (meaning you ran out and bought something from that company).

Now if you were on a forum or doing a search for the best Vacuum or best beer or what car you should buy -- you're already interested in the product and far more receptive to being pitched too at that moment.

If you can't have a captive audience, then the next best thing (or maybe better thing) is to have an audience who is looking to buy already. FB and other social sites don't provide that...

I got my current job there—not much to say, just was an excellent source of quality positions.

I got my job through careers. But then again, I work for Stack Exchange ;-)

Had contact with a couple of interesting people, startups, companies via SO Careers. I think, it's one of the top job hubs currently, if you are in the software business.

> more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers.

So at the end it's all about recruiting like LinkedIn?

Well, it's about monetization.

Nobody's going to give them $40M if there is no conceivable way to get their money back.

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