Testing a new version of Stack Overflow Jobs

Question

Update on October 10, 2024:

As of today, Stack Overflow Jobs will be hosted on stackoverflowjobs.com. If you visit stackoverflow.jobs it will reroute to the new domain. Along with making this change, we have also fixed several issues noted on the Known Issues post.

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Update on May 8th, 2024

Stack Overflow Jobs is now live. If you notice any bugs or other issues with the job site please report them on this separate post.

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I am happy to announce that we are experimenting with bringing back a version of Stack Overflow Jobs!

The first iteration of Stack Overflow Jobs brought a lot of value to the developer community. At its peak, it served legions of job seekers resulting in roughly 6 million yearly job searches, 2 million yearly “apply” clicks, and above industry average application submission rates.

Many community members reported a strong preference for using Stack Overflow Jobs in their job search because of our unique focus on developer needs, and were truly disappointed to see it go.

But unfortunately, the business model of the feature was not sustainable for Stack because of the investment it would have taken to make it competitive with other job sites. However, we are aware of how much users liked it, and how many people found a great job through it. In the last few years, we have heard repeatedly from community members that they want it back.

We heard you, and we are delighted to announce that we are introducing a new version of Stack Overflow Jobs, crafted in partnership with Indeed, a leading global hiring platform. By partnering with Indeed, we believe we have found a solution that allows us to provide a best-in-class job site experience while continuing to focus on our strength – the developer community.

What’s being tested

Stack Overflow Jobs will be launching in the coming weeks as an initial test (we will update this post once the experiment is live, so stay tuned). At first, this will be only available in the US. Through the first phase of this experiment we will be looking to get answers to some of these questions:

• Does the new Stack Overflow Jobs allow us to bring the same degree of value to technical job seekers as the prior version did?

• Does this business model enable us to expand to more markets so we can serve more job seekers?

• Can we create the long-term sustainability needed to continue building upon and improving this feature?

We know job searching can be stressful and time consuming. Half the battle is finding quality jobs that are a good match for your skills and interests, before even starting the application process. We believe that by combining the unique strengths of Stack Overflow, including our dedication to the developer community, and Indeed’s volume of quality tech jobs, we can help developers and other technical job seekers find their next great opportunity via a curated, tech focused job site.

We see this as just the beginning, with hopes of proving out this partnership model to expand in both product features and functionally, as well as more markets outside the US.

How it works

The new Stack Overflow Jobs, powered by Indeed, will be hosted on its own domain (stackoverflowjobs.com), linked from the left navigation on Stack Overflow and technical Stack Exchange sites (the same group of sites where you see ‘Companies’ in the left navigation, though to be clear ‘Companies’ and ‘Jobs’ remain separate features).

The job site will showcase thousands of technical job listings in the US. Use keyword searches to find jobs that are a great fit for your interests and experience. In order to apply for a job, hit the “apply” button and you will be redirected to the posting on Indeed, where you can submit your application. No personal data about users is shared between Stack Overflow and Indeed.

We are taking measures to ensure that the listings that populate Stack Overflow Jobs will be high quality and highly relevant to the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange technical community. However in the event that something off-topic slips through the cracks, we want to get it corrected as soon as possible. See the help center article here with more information.

Feedback

We are considering this an experiment with bringing back a feature that previously brought a lot of value to the site. As we learn, we will evaluate growth and expansion opportunities. This may include revisiting features from the original version of Stack Overflow Jobs and/or building new ones, to continue helping technologists on a job search journey.

Our goal is to create a job site experience that developers and other technical job seekers love. Let us know how we can do that!

When thinking about searching for your next technical role, what pieces of information or features would be most useful for you?

Do you have feedback about your experience with the original Stack Overflow Jobs? What did you like or dislike?

What are the most important things for us to keep in mind as we iterate on this experiment?

Answer 1

I feel like this might be missing the point, the core thing we liked about SO Jobs. We don't want to go to yet another job site and "create an Indeed profile". We want our existing SO profile to be the core of our experience, so it can be showcased to recruiters as a first class part of our identity on the platform.

Answer 2

The only thing I'm annoyed about with this announcement is the title. SO Jobs isn't coming back, this isn't SO Jobs. If you want a partnership with Indeed and think that will be profitable, great! but this isn't what SO Jobs was. It isn't different from every other job search network (it's literally just phoned in from another job search network!)

I don't really understand yet why I would use this over just going to indeed. Surely I'd rather see all of the job listings relevant to my searches rather than just the ones SO has deemed worthy of my viewing.

Answer 3

But unfortunately, the business model of the feature was not sustainable for Stack because of the investment it would have taken to make it competitive with other job sites.

The primary advantage of the Stack Overflow job site was that most employment agencies and HR departments did not know about it, so when a job was posted it was likely that had been posted by a developer who was part of the team you would be going to work on.

Likewise unlike other job sites, posting a job on Stack Overflow did not lead to 100s of phone calls from agents offering candidates.

Hence it would lose all value from being "competitive with other job sites".

Answer 4

I'm unclear exactly what Stack Overflow is offering here... Doesn't the image you share look the exact same as the existing Indeed UI with a different logo?

Answer 5

One thing that made the old Stack Overflow Jobs unique is the "Developer Story" where people could have some sort of public CV.
I think that might be one thing many people liked that feature yet I haven't seen anything about that in this announcements.

Are there any plans to have something similar to that?

Answer 6

Do you have feedback about your experience with the original Stack Overflow Jobs? What did you like or dislike?

As a C-language programmer, Stack Overflow Jobs was the best job search experience by far. I could actually search for C programming jobs! Try that on any other job search site (including Indeed) and you'll get a few results buried in an endless sea of C++ and C# jobs that aren't even remotely relevant. Job search engines don't do well with one-letter query terms, and they typically straight-up ignore non-alphanumeric characters. I'd waste literal hours digging through results to find one or two that were actually relevant to my search terms. Or, I could go to SO Jobs and do the same thing in 15 seconds.

If you're making a programmer-focused job site, being able to accurately filter by programming language should be a must-have feature. Companies posting jobs should have to specify the languages involved, preferably by using something akin to the tag chooser on Stack Overflow instead of just free-form text entry. Bonus points if you have separate categories for "required" and "nice to have" languages.

Answer 7

Update: Thanks for hearing the feedback about this question's original title and fixing it.

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I am pleased to learn that you are acting on community feedback. I want to learn more about how the new Stack Overflow Jobs will work.

Like others, I'm "annoyed" by the marketing style used on some Meta SE post titles. I understand that there are perspectives on this being considered a regular business practice. I know there are marketing reasons to reuse online service names, in this case, Stack Overflow Jobs, but you are not bringing back something; you are just reusing a service name. Google has done the same, even using the same name simultaneously (a recent case is using "Workspace" as a product and feature name).

Stack Overflow has been walking away from its roots. While we should accept that they are a business dealing with complex goals in complex times, I think that it's fair to expect them to keep Meta Stack Exchange as a place leaning closer to what is expected about post titles in the Stack Exchange Network: They should be a summary of the post content and free of "click bait" like writing style.

I think that partnerships are good; I just hope that this will bring back the best features of the original Stack Overflow Jobs.

Answer 8

When thinking about searching for your next technical role, what pieces of information or features would be most useful for you?

The Joel Test Score was pretty great. The answers are what matters to developers, and employers having to fill out this part is a step that acts as a minimal filter to keep job postings in scope. Please make sure to bring it (or something similar) back.

Answer 9

By allowing Indeed to power your listings, you pick up the weaknesses of the platform as well as the capabilities. I think it's worth listing some of the things that I don't like about how Indeed works:

1. It doesn't match well on programming language. It will include listings that use entirely different languages but mention the search term briefly. Unsurprisingly, employers don't tend to respond well to applications on that basis.
2. It doesn't limit to the kind of jobs you request. For example, I'm looking for senior engineer jobs and it keeps showing me jobs with management responsibilities, like tech lead or CTO.
3. I can't tell it I only want salaried jobs and not hourly jobs. Only that I want a particular annualized result.
4. I can't limit my search to only results that allow applications through the platform. It mixes results that do with ones that require other platforms. Note that there are three types: uses Indeed; has its own; uses another job board.
5. I can't control whether or not I get notified that a particular application has gone into a terminal state. I don't need a hundred emails telling me that "Hey, we had over a hundred applicants, and we're not interviewing you." Personally, I would like to see information like that on a polling basis (I look in the job platform to check job status) rather than a push basis (email or other notification). I only want push notifications for rare things, like interview requests.
6. I can't filter out employers to whom I already applied. Yes, I realize that this would cause me to miss out on some opportunities, but it will filter out far more non-opportunities.
7. It should be easier for employers to include previous applicants in future interview loops. This should partially compensate for the lost opportunities from the last.

In general, I think that both employers and potential employees would like for there to be fewer but better applications. Indeed is taking steps to improve that, but they aren't that far along.

Answer 10

Tangential to the topic at hand, I'm rather disappointed this got left sidebar space, and chat and meta haven't despite long standing feature requests. As a moderator on a technical site and another one, it’s something that would have potential long term benefits for my site.

Is this going to replace the companies link (which is essentially a vestigial organ of 'old' careers) or is it an added on link without any other changes? (I missed that this was covered in the question)

I see other folks have covered the USPs of old jobs/careers, specifically the developer story, so I won't retread that again. But I suspect that'll have more value for many people.

I used to critique the old SO jobs as something that didn't work because SO was a small fish in the broader job-website market, so I actually think this may be the right way to go if you can combine letting Indeed do the part of building a job site (and ideally at minimal developer work on the SO side) and adding the things that made SO jobs unique on top of that.

You would also do well to remember the main value SO has is their reputation, and preserving that with the community would be a good idea if people were to go with the SO Indeed instance over the main one.

On that note, it feels like you're 'lending' the SO name to a simple rebranded indeed page. I'm pretty sure that the answer I'd get here is 'we can't talk about the financial details', but we just went through a very painful belt tightening process. I'd hope that these 'initiatives' are going to help the bottom line, and that at least some of these resources flow back to the community.

Answer 11

I never used the original jobs site but to answer this question:

When thinking about searching for your next technical role, what pieces of information or features would be most useful for you?

• Salary (ideally broken down by geographical areas if multiple options are available)
• Ability to comment and ask questions about the position (to the poster and to the community)
• Ability to rate job openings (up/down vote)
• Structured search/filtering on all things like location, remote work, salary, perks, tech stack, travel requirements, on-call, team size etc etc.

Answer 12

Bringing the SO Jobs is great news. What I wouldn't want to do is to be redirected via 10 links signing up to every platform in the process. It would be good to complete the job application process within SO.

I remember receiving messages directly in Stack Overflow. Also the Developer story would be great to have.

Answer 13

I miss having my Stack Overflow profile and reputation disconnected from potential employers. I felt that gave some weight to my conversations.

Answer 14

What's the decision process for which jobs get listed on the new Stack Overflow Jobs?

As Ian Ringrose explained in their answer, most recruiters not knowing about the old Stack Overflow Jobs was a major advantage.

Is this a checkbox toggled by recruiters, is it automatically determined by Indeed in some way or is it something else? To be honest, I think that if you want this to be actually useful, it should be something that requires explicit opt-in in a way that only looks interesting for people that actually want to have it on Stack Overflow Jobs.

Answer 15

So... Now that this is live, it's fairly clear that this is just a wrapper of indeed with even less features than indeed has, built by yet another third party (Jobbio). I'm sure over time it'll regain some of the missing features, but will it ever have features that go above and beyond what just going to indeed directly provides? What value would I have in using SO Jobs compared to just going to indeed directly? As it stands now, as an MVP, it probably shouldn't be linked from the side menu. A link to indeed directly would be far more useful to users than this at it's current stage.

Answer 16

A lot of the value I find in current job listings solutions is the ability to set up a profile with your past experience and future interests and receiving a list that is somewhat relevant to that information. Given this solution is disconnected from your SO profile, would it be filtered by your indeed profile if you had one?

What measures are being taken to ensure offerings are "high quality and highly relevant," particularly in the case of SO where what is relevant to any given person could vary wildly with how broad the set of topics are on SO? Even if you were taking into account our activity on SO to filter jobs... for me that'd be a relatively poor filter, the things I answer questions for aren't really all that relevant for what I actually do on a daily basis or for what I'd be interested in.

Answer 17

When thinking about searching for your next technical role, what pieces of information or features would be most useful for you?

After experimenting with various job search sites, I'm now using a platform which offers a lot of filters, allowing to have a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio.

Let's look at the things it includes:

• type of job (allows me to select "devops", which includes all the different titles that gets included in that category)
• location incl remote only
• salary
• equity
• skills I'll get to use in the job
• company markets
• full time / contract / internship / cofounder
• required experience
• included keywords
• excluded keywords
• company size
• investment stage
• "only show companies that are mostly or fully remote"
• "only show companies that can sponsor a visa"

There's also an extensive preferences section that allows me to specify things that adjust whether I show up in companies' searches (this for instance allows me to filter out all cryptocurrency startups).

The end result of these things is that there's enough reduction of noise I can actually spend my human time looking at the results. That is really the thing I care about, but the most obvious path towards that is gathering all of this structured metadata and allowing us to filter on it - we are programmers and aren't scared of having a bazillion fields at our disposal. You could even give us a psuedo-SQL interface for querying this, like New Relic does for metrics and Jira does for tickets - but staying simpler than that would still be incredibly useful. Without some way to filter all these things, though, it's just not worth my time due to the high proportion of job listings that show up in a naive search and aren't interesting to me.

Answer 18

As someone who has actually landed a job from SO Careers back in 2016, I would say that the best thing about SO Careers was that it worked.

...unlike certain other sites, whose signal-to-noise ratio is so low, that I cannot really say that they work.