Why does careers distinguish itself from other job sites when employers don't appear to care about site reputation?

Question

When Careers 2.0 first popped up, I thought it was an excellent concept. Invested employers could appreciated programmers who liked working collaboratively, get a very real sense of the technical skills of potential candidates, and inspect a person's development over time, all before initial contact.

It seemed like a great reward for those who had invested energy into StackOverflow.

But last I had checked the site, the vast majority of employers requested a resume be submitted via e-mail, and I never received any contact directly through there that referenced my activity on SO.

Although I appreciate Careers wants to appeal to as many employers as possible, and therefore many will not know about SO or have the time to delve so deeply into employee history, I feel the emphasis on PDF and e-mail-submitted resumes removes its killer feature.

Answer 1

On the job listing side, the killer feature for employers is highly directed advertising via job ads on Stack Overflow. As an employer, you want your listing to be seen by the most qualified people possible and SO is a highly concentrated area for professional developers.

When it comes to applying, 50-60% of all job listings posted on our site use our apply with profile feature (vs all listings) and that number has remained fairly constant over the last year or so. There are a lot of practical reasons for this like for instance wanting to manage all of your open job listings (not just developers) in one place, which we simply don't provide the tools for. When you use the apply with your profile feature, you have the option to generate your resume directly from your profile and we also include a direct link to your profile in the email we send to the employer. So somewhere between 40-50% of employers are missing out on this data at any given time.

We totally agree with you that your profile and involvement in the developer community, in particular your participation on SO, should receive more emphasis (at least your answers, not just the reputation score itself). That being said, a lot of the people who are receiving your resumes are not really capable of using this extra data to improve their resume sorting (pass/trash) method because they know HR or the ceo of a small shop, but they never were developers. It's really up to us to expose this data in a more friendly way and to teach these employers how to use it effectively so that it becomes much more of a burden to hire developers without this data. That problem is on us and it's a hard problem to solve.