StackOverflow’s Careers 2.0 Leverages Q&A To Get Programmers Hired

StackOverflow co-founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood know their audience. The Q&A site popular with programmers is today launching its Careers 2.0 effort at careers.stackoverflow.com, unveiling a complete revamp of the “dinky careers site” that was there before.

The new site is replete with fleshed out search interface (below), which lets employers search the StackOverflow programmer database by skills and location among other things. Prospective employers can also see the number of “active” candidates (people actively searching for jobs) vs. “passive” (people who would consider job offers if good enough) as well as include students or limit searches to people who have a legal right to work in the United States.

The best part of Careers 2.0 is that it leverages the candidate’s favorite or best answers on StackOverflow itself, featuring them on each profile as testament to the candidate’s coding skills. This is huge, imagine if Quora highlighted the hours people put into answers to help find them jobs.

“You can search for Ruby on Rails programmers in Chicago, and we’ll find folks who have written highly scored ruby answers on Stack Overflow,” says Spolsky. As the technology talent crunch continues, we will see more and more career services focusing solely on engineering. And like Hackcruiter, Careers 2.0 was built specifically to appeal to programmers.

“Everything is completely redesigned and rebuilt to look great, work fast,” says Spolsky. Careers 2.0 is free for developers with the catch that you have to be invited by either your peers or a StackOverflow moderator (before anyone with a credit card could sign up). Employers have to pony up $500 for weekly access.