Careers 2.0 - Employer feedback?

Question

Is there any chance of implementing the ability for programmers to leave feedback about employers registered on Careers 2.0, preferably anonymously and not shared with employers?

While I would normally be against allowing anonymous feedback, I think it would be okay because of Careers 2.0's closed nature.

I'm asking this because I've recently been encountering a huge increase in all of the things that made Careers 2.0 better than job boards like Monster or Dice.

For example, recruiters who contact everyone with some keyword on their CV regardless of whether they have the skills they're looking for (may as well equate it to spam), recruiters who contact you and then don't respond when you say you're interested (similar to the prior), and recruiters who fill the position while you're actively interviewing with them and just stop contacting you without letting you know.

All of this behavior is a pretty big inconvenience to job searchers. I think some sort of functionality like this would at least give the employers more incentive to act professionally.

Answer 1

As Stack Overflow Careers continues to grow, maintaining a quality experience for candidates (and employers) is an important part of what we are trying to do. We take all feedback about low-quality interactions very seriously and would strongly encourage anyone who has had a less that optimal experience with the system or any particular user or employer to email us details at careers@stackoverflow.com. While this type of feedback is not anonymous, we will hold it in complete confidence.

Besides the above, one of the key ways that the community of users helps us detect problems is via the following dialog that is available to candidates in response to employer messages:

Note that the two highlighted items above, in combination with other statistics about use patterns, provide direct signals into a ranking of employer accounts and the detection of many bad behaviors. Therefore, it’s very helpful to take advantage of these features, as appropriate, when responding to messages.

On the point of employers not getting back to candidates later in the process, admittedly, after the initial set of interactions occur, we don’t have a good way to detect somebody dropping the ball on follow-up communications because after contact details have been exchanged, many times further exchanges happen off the system. However, your feedback has sensitized us to it more and already got us talking about what we might be able to do there to detect and track that.

Finally, for the record, we do take a long run view about the quality of the interactions vs. the quantity of transactions on our system and never hesitate to simply return received monies and close an account when any kind of pattern of abuse has been established.

Answer 2

I think if you're getting this kind of crap from employers on Careers, you should contact Careers directly to report it. Obviously financially, they have no direct incentive to 'police' employers. But long-term they obviously do, because they will lower the perceived value of the interface to developers, and that will go pear-shaped.

That aside, I'm not sure how it would be technically possible to implement what you request. How do you prevent employers from seeing what developers can see? (All they have to do is create a new login, after all). And how do you check that what developers are reporting anonymously is actually true?

The simplest thing I can thing of could be upvotes/downvotes for companies, but even that is a skewed metric, because you don't know how many people have really worked there, nor the percentage of overall employees-on-SO compared to number of votes.