Has anyone ever mentioned their Stack Overflow profile on their CV?

Question

My question is to all those people who have done this in the past in their interviews OR to the people who have interviewed people and asked them a question about their contribution to the community via Stack Overflow.

I have always wondered, in these practical tests that employers take in the interviewing process, that it is very difficult to know someone’s actual worth. Whereas, if you get on someone’s Stack Overflow profile, within a few minutes you will have a very good understanding of the level of knowledge that the person has. Yet, a lot of employers will not even bother asking such questions.

For instance, in my own company’s case: when I suggested to my operational manager to ask people questions about their participation on online IT communities, he didn’t seem very convinced. And, from time to time, we end up hiring people who did very good in their practical tests during the interviewing process, but miserably failed to keep up with the company’s SLA.

Please share your thoughts. And please do mention if any of you have any such checks in place for your recruiting process. Or if you provided your Stack Overflow profile to your potential employer which helped you in the process of getting a job.

Answer 1

I'll offer a personal experience.

I was invited to interview for a job through my Careers 2.0 profile, which prominently mentions my Stack Overflow contributions, and was hired 5 months ago. They clearly knew of my contributions, referencing some of my posts, in the interviews.

And I am not the only one. I sit across from someone in the overall top 30 on Stack Overflow, again found through Careers 2.0 and his contributions.

Clearly, some tech companies do use Stack Overflow as a tool to find and assess potential candidates.

The company is still hiring; we need QA people, especially, at the moment. If you feel you qualify and are willing to relocate to Cambridge, UK or Cupertino, CA, USA, search for jobs in that area on Careers 2.0. I'll leave out the company page link to not unfairly advertise; if you are motivated enough you'll find us anyway.

If you do get an interview, feel free to mention me!

Answer 2

I'll answer as someone that was in the position of hiring programmers.

I looked at general participation in online communities, Stack Overflow just happens to lend itself very well to seeing how well you communicate at a glance. Since I was a moderator for so long, I'd go incognito and look at a profile.

I didn't interpret reputation as a measure of your skill, I interpreted it as a measure of how well you conveyed your knowledge, or asked for knowledge from your peers. To that effect, this particular tab becomes a gold mine to any recruiter or hiring manager worth their salt.

Using that tab, I can readily see:

• How nice / helpful you tend to be
• How inclined you might be to maintain things you wrote in the past, voluntarily
• What you've been doing recently, since that might be obscured by overwhelming participation in other tags

You might have 100k rep, but if you're a total snark in your interactions, I'm very likely to pass over you in favor of someone less skilled with a better ability to learn and not be feared or broadly avoided by the rest of the team. I don't need someone actively making fun of people that know less than they do.

On the other side, Stack Overflow led me to a few really good positions - my participation was enough to put me ahead of equally qualified candidates. Oddly enough, this alternate universe was what played an integral role in obtaining my latest gig :)

Long story short - positive participation nearly anywhere that can be seen at a glance is very likely going to help you get hired. Stack Overflow is a well known community, and we make it very easy for employers to research candidates that include links to their profile. However, high rep != hire - long term positive participation that strongly evidences your desire to share and teach does.

Answer 3

It will sound lame and self-referential, but it's also very true.

At Stack Exchange we do so all the time. Among all the factors we do consider:

• Your reputation points on the site
• Your contributions, like your answers
• etc.

In fact, we believe so strongly that good candidates have a solid reputation of getting things done and that high-reputation point users are likely to be good candidates that we built a whole careers site dedicated to this.

You can see my profile at http://careers.stackoverflow.com/sklivvz. We actively encourage showing off your Stack Overflow reputation points.

On the other hand, there are very many famous examples of awesome companies that use our reputation points-based profiles to recruit top developers, for example Facebook, Skype, Tumblr, Amazon, Moo, Coursera, etc.

I am personally convinced that reviewing the whole Internet presence, including Stack Overflow reputation points, is fundamental to finding valid candidates.

Answer 4

My biggest motivation to contribute on Stack Overflow was the opportunity that I can show my profile in my CV. I've seen job advertisements where they expressly said "show us your GitHub or Stack Overflow profile if you got one".

I can totaly understand this behaviour, because you can check how professional somebody is. You can see which areas or technologies are the strengths or the interests of that person by looking at his questions or answers on Stack Overflow.

Also, you can check if somebody is able to use version control systems and has the ability to work collaboratively in large projects with other people, by checking his GitHub account.

Also in countries where English is not the native language, this is a great way to check if somebody is being able to read and write properly in English, and knows not just the basics of the language but also the technical expressions.

Companies always try to find out what kind of people they are going to hire. That's the reason they are checking their Facebook or other social media pages. Accordingly they should look at their other accounts where they can check their skills too.

Answer 5

All the other answers are focused on SO, here's a Server Fault (SF) example:

I took some time off (actually, a lot) between my last job and the one I started earlier this year. When I applied and was interviewed for the job, I mentioned and we discussed my participation on SF. I don't know that they checked out my activity in any detail, but they did mention that it was one factor they took into account.

One other benefit of participating on SO, SF, or whatever is that by being active in the community and getting to "know" other people who are active, even if you have a question that doesn't fit the SE model, you know who to ask in chat, whose blog to check, etc.

Answer 6

I wanted to add that quite apart from whether or not to include it on the CV, is the notion of making real sure your headhunter knows about it. Headhunters and agents are quite happy to tout anything they think will help sell you, such as a presence on SO.

I had one headhunter who was so bedazzled with my 250 rep that he was seriously introducing me as 'the best C# developer in the world'. That was a bit over-the-top, but you can get the idea.

And once in an interview, the prospective employer asked me: 'Can you tell me what a ListCollectionView is?'; and I said 'I hope so. I wrote the wiki tag for it on Stack Overflow'. So he pulled it up and read it.

Aside from headhunters and agents, I will sometimes post a badge on LinkedIn. But would never mention SO on my formal CV.