Now that Stack Overflow Careers is formally out of beta and fully operational, we're getting a lot of traction with employers and making some excellent connections between companies who love great programmers, and programmers who love to code. Here are a few recent success stories people have shared with us:
I was part of a mass layoff around Thanksgiving. That means another job search. So, I published my CV on SO Careers. In just one week, I received a message from an employer saying that they would like to interview me. So, I scheduled an interview. Later that week, one of my recruiters called me about the same position. Can it really take that long to get a recruiter on board? I think that this really exemplifies one of the huge benefits of SO Careers: the power is given back to the primary parties involved! Individuals have a space where they can show themselves in a much more interesting and useful way. Employers are given the power to find these people directly and on their own schedule. There is no middle-man to clog up the works. This same employer made me an offer 30 minutes after I left the interview. I am employed again! Thanks for making this wonderful site. -- Sean Massa
And another:
I wanted to take a couple minutes to thank you all for your work on Stackoverflow careers. I filed my CV last year and got my first hit last week. The employer called me and brought me in for an interview. Now I'm facing a job offer providing a 30% raise ... what sucks is I like my current job! I just wanted you all to know your hard work and innovative ideas have impacted both my career and my bank account. The employer told me that my Stackoverflow account directly influenced their hiring decision because they could verify skills through the site. Keep up the good work! -- a programmer in Georgia
And another:
I was currently employed but was in that 25% at DevDays that "hated their job and couldn’t wait to find something better." It wasn't the people I worked with or the work that I did necessarily; it was the culture and the nature of being in a "corporate" job; it was so political and difficult to get the tools I needed to do my job in the best way that I could (I ended up buying my own tools such as R# and even my own keyboard and mouse). I knew I wanted a new job, but I didn't want to just move to another job that put me in the same situation as I was currently in. I have been searching for companies to work for in the area through all of the normal avenues (plain networking, monster, indeed, craigslist even) and it was so polluted with jobs that made it difficult to filter down. This is where StackOverflow careers has succeeded for me; a smaller company who had great working conditions was able to find me and provide me all of the opportunities that I was looking for. I never thought that I would be able to be employed by a company that shared some mindset similarities with FogCreek (such as providing great compensation, private offices, top of the line dev machines, Aeron chairs, passed the Joel test, etc!). When I interviewed, my future employer already had a sense of who I was based upon the questions and answers on my StackOverflow profile, and those gave us things to discuss during the interview (in a sense it "broke the ice", which was awesome for me and I'm sure for my future employer as well). Thanks to all of you for building this community that has provided me and other developers the opportunity to share our knowledge and continuously learn. And thanks to StackOverflow Careers for giving me a platform to market myself to the employers that don't necessarily have big, recognizable names but can provide developers with what they are looking for. -- Jon Erickson
And another:
Stack Overflow Careers was directly responsible for me landing the perfect job at a local company here in Washington, DC. I am finally escaping the pain and suffering of being a government programmer. The timing of Careers could not have been better. I published my CV the day the public beta became available and linked it with my StackOverflow account. Two days after you moved the hiring side of careers out of beta, [my new employer] contacted me. I never would have found them on my own. After lots of talking and getting to know each other,I formally accepted the job with them today and begin my new job March first. Your product has been instrumental in my job search. From your product I received five solid leads with top tier technology companies in a three month period (including the employer beta). The other job board products I tried got me nothing - not even when I reached out to employers directly. I will absolutely recommend your product to all of my co-workers at my old office and to anyone I know who is looking to land a top tier job in the software field. -- Ryan Michela
If you have a success story from careers, feel free to mail us at careers@stackoverflow.com, or post it in the meta thread. But that doesn't mean we've been slacking off.* We've been busy at work improving Stack Overflow Careers over the last few weeks, too. One of the most common requests we got was to provide more details on who exactly the employers are, and what they're looking for. So we've added the ability for any CV owner to view detailed employer search statistics. The cold, hard search data speaks for itself:
These statistics are live and updated every hour. Create your own CV and you, too, can browse the employer search stats at will. We haven't forgotten employers, either. Employers who subscribe to careers for longer than a week have one-click access to their entire saved search history. It appears right there on the search form, under the search button.
Give your searches names, click to repeat them -- and if you subscribe for 6 months or a year, we'll even email you new CV matches to your favorite searches as they come in. While the number of results may seem smallish, we believe that these are all extremely high quality candidates. Yes, we're biased, but consider typical job board results. Sure, you may get 100 responses from that job board ad, but how many of those candidates are qualified? How many of them are competent? How many of them love to program like we do? In other words, as an employer, how much is your time worth? Sean Massa, who just got a job through careers, sent in this followup note:
My new company loves SO Careers. They refer to it as the Gold Mine.
We realize that this is a smaller, more selective audience -- but that's the goal. We want to build a concentrated, specialized group of companies and programmers who get it. A tribe of people who love this stuff as much as we do. Anyway, if you were holding off on careers because you weren't sure if it would work, I don't blame you. What we're doing is a little unorthodox, as we explain on the about page. With the caveat that we're never going to be the next enormo-megacorp Dice or Monster (and thank goodness), all current signs point to it working! Remember:
- Public CVs are always free, forever. There is a nominal fee to file your CV and make it visible to our private employer search engine.
- It's completely free to test our private search engine as an employer.
- There is zero risk. If you subscribe and you’re not satisfied for any reason, within 90 days you get a full refund, period, no questions asked. We don’t want your money if you’re not amazingly happy.
If any of that sounds useful, I encourage you to check out Stack Overflow Careers. You can search for jobs by location (e.g. developer jobs in San Fransisco) or by language (e.g. jobs using WordPress) and more.
- No more than usual, anyway