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I would like to be able to HIDE the employer names in my CV unless I authorize the visibility. This will prevent recruiters from sending my resume into companies without my approval.

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  • I could see this being helpful for other reasons. If you have your current employer's name publicly visible, and you end up indexed in Google somehow, and your employer monitors Google search results for its own name, depending on the situation that could make things "interesting" for you.
    – Left For Archive
    Nov 19, 2009 at 8:32

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Contingency recruiters are not allowed and unwelcome... these are the ones who have a tendency to spam in hopes of scoring a commission.

(Retained recruiters are allowed and welcome... they represent employers directly and are indistinguishable from the employer's own hiring staff.)

Anyone employer/recruiter using the system will be required to reveal the name of the hiring company in their first email to you, and only email you through our site. If you ignore their request, they are not permitted to contact you again. Only if you reply with interest would they be allowed to continue to contact you.

We'll be able to detect contingency recruiters because their attempts to contact people will result in an unusually high number of ignored requests. There is no way to completely prevent an unscrupulous recruiter from scraping CVs and then using google, phone books, etc., to try to contact you. This can be done trivially from Google without paying hundreds of dollars for employer access to careers.stackoverflow.com, so I doubt if we'll have contingency recruiters paying us for access, but if it happens, we'll look into ways to make their lives difficult, including, potentially, a feature to report a problematic "employer" registered on the site who is not honoring the TOS.

If you really think this is important, it is extremely easy for you to hide the employer names yourself, so this feature is not really necessary. It is not unusual to see a CV in which the employer's names are replaced by descriptions, e.g., instead of Apple Computer, you might see "Large Consumer Computer Manufacturer, Cupertino, California"

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  • This would be most helpful if we can hide the employer names from the public resume/CV that we expose, but allow actual recruiting users on SO Careers to see the company names of our work history. We can't currently do this by simply removing the company names from the field as that removes it from both public view and employer/recruiter view.
    – CraigTP
    Apr 10, 2012 at 10:32
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I post my resume on my webpage (links to .txt and .pdf versions), along with this note:

MSWord and RTF versions removed due to abuse. Authorization is NOT granted to edit and redistribute these documents.

I don't know if it has any effect but it does make my intentions clear: do not think about submitting my resume to a client without talking to me first. Perhaps the careers site could use a checkbox like this?

[ x ] Recruiters: notify the candidate first before submitting to a client

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    I like this feature as well ..
    – tomjedrz
    Nov 16, 2009 at 22:48
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    My theory is that recruiters are soulless scumbags. Many are not going to concern themselves with a check-box. But yea, I only like to distribute my CV in PDF format--that seems to be enough to stump them from adding C#, COBAL, & ColdFusion without my knowledge in the distant hopes of landing a commision.
    – Stu Thompson
    Nov 17, 2009 at 6:55
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Why would it? I've known recruiters send CVs to companies when I've explicitly told them not to. I can see why not having employer names might stop some, but it won't stop all.

Anyway, according to this answer from Joel:

In addition, we can add it to the Terms of Service that anybody using the resume search feature must be searching for an active position, and must reveal the name of the employer to the job seeker in the first email.

So if a recruiter does send your e-mail off without your consent they're breaking their contract with Stack Overflow.

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  • Are recruiters explicitly disallowed? I believe they are on jobs.stackoverflow.com (or at least, the hiring company must be identified), but I don't recall if this has been spelled out for careers.
    – Ether
    Nov 16, 2009 at 22:37

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