More flexible privacy settings for the public and private profiles

Question

Is it possible to make the detailed job experience description available to the Stack Overflow Careers logged users only?

I need more flexible privacy settings for the public profile, e.g. my public profile in SOC will contain only a brief description of my job experience and the detailed information will be available only to logged users. In such way, I'll know, in the most of times, who is interesting my profile, like I can do it in LinkedIn.

The current functionality is going in «all or nothing» strategy and thus is problematic. It allows to you or completely expose your profile and thus any privacy settings in LinkedIn become useless (user can anonymously see your profile in SOC). Or completely hide profile for the search engines by making it private and this will significantly limit your potential auditory.

The bottom line, I want to be able to propose the enough information to interest someone, in other words, to propose a teaser, but if someone is really interested in my profile, he should «buy a ticket» — I would like to get more information about viewer and not to allow an anonymous full profile view. LinkedIn allows such policy, Stack Overflow Careers — currently not.

Answer 1

I think there's some confusion here around three different settings (and it's possible I don't fully understand what scenario you're imagining where some people find your "teaser" profile).

The reason for the "public" setting on the profile is to enable you to send a link to your Stack Overflow Careers profile anywhere you would normally send a resumé. This could be a link from your website, in an application on another job board, anyplace where you'd need a resumé.

If you want greater discoverability, you can allow search engines to index your profile, too. If you want greater control over what information is available to whom, you can block search engines, which effectively means your public profile would only be seen by people who have the link.

The last piece of this is the most important to your request of forcing people to "buy a ticket". In addition to the public/private setting, there is an Employer Searches & Messaging setting on your profile settings page. If you choose "looking for a job" or "not looking, but open to being contacted," we'll show your profile in search results for paying customers who subscribe to our Candidate Search product. If you choose the "block all messages and searches" setting, your profile will not appear in search results for our customers. This is completely independent of whether your profile is public or private, though.

So I believe that these setting together provide what you're looking for. If you only want people viewing your profile if they've purchased access, set your profile to private, block it from being indexed by search engines, and set your messaging preference to "looking for a job" or "not looking, but open to being contacted".

I'm afraid we don't generally build Stack Overflow Careers profiles to optimize for compatibility with LinkedIn; we're perfectly okay with you having profiles on both, but it's unlikely that we'll build features and preferences to exactly match another site's.