Stack Overflow has always had a strong focus on individual merit. Although collaboration is encouraged to some extent by the editing features, attribution on posts and the design of user profiles all tend to emphasize rugged individuality, that lone wolf toiling away at a keyboard.

But most of us don’t actually work that way. We’re social creatures by nature, and the most challenging part of finding a good job can be finding the pack you want to run with. In spite of the dearth of features aimed at networking, folks have been using Stack Overflow to find and research potential colleagues almost since the day it launched – so a couple years ago, we started looking for ways to make this a bit easier. Well, now it’s done:

With Company Pages, we’ve focused on the best ways to tell an interesting company story. And what better way to tell your story than with massive photos of workstations, team outings, hackathons, local attractions, and the people who make the companies who they are? There are tightly designed sections to list your company tech stack and benefits, along with plenty of room to be creative and communicate what makes your company special, what awesome products you’re working on, and the philosophy that drives your team forward.
—Introducing Careers 2.0 Company Pages

Go check out the other wolf-packs… or show off your own on Careers 2.0.

When we launched Careers 2.0 back in 2011, we set out with a goal: make the job search process better for the millions of programmers who visit our site every month. Part of achieving this goal is educating employers about what you want from them. In the past, our annual user survey helped us help companies change the way they found and hired programmers, while Joel’s book on how to find the best technical talent and his talk on how to stand out and attract top talent are a few other examples of how we’ve worked to educate tech companies on what you really want.

Today, we’re taking this one step further:

Announcing the Employer Resource Center on Careers 2.0

Employers are having a really hard time getting programmers to work for them — hardly a day goes by without another article, blog post or Tweet attesting to this. A study last year found that as many as 93% of employers find a disparity between the technical skills required and the level of the talent they’re able to find while recruiting. As a result, talented programmers are in incredibly high demand, putting you in a position to demand the best jobs, perks, and benefits.

In the Employer Resource Center, we offer advice on best practices, recruitment news and trends, case studies and product guides to help employers with developer hiring. We’ll be updating the content regularly (mostly via the new Careers 2.0 blog), so check back often! If you have any tips you think employers should know about hiring developers, please leave a note in the comments below.

After months of work from our dev team, last week marked the official launch of our first localized site with Careers 2.0 in German. We celebrated the occasion in style on December 5 with a blow-out party at Betahaus in Berlin complete with product demos, free food, free t-shirts, oh, and German beer of course.

(More pictures here.)

But why Germany? Well, aside from the fact that it gave us a great excuse to make these really cool t-shirts, we have a few other pretty good reasons for this expansion:

• Germans are the largest non-English-speaking group of Stack Overflow users in Europe
  To date, visitors from Germany represent the fourth largest global audience who visit Stack Overflow on a monthly basis—making this the largest non-English speaking European userbase. And even though many of these users do speak English (at least for programming), employers or hiring managers who don’t speak English can’t use the Careers 2.0 global site as easily as fluent English speakers. With this localization, we hope to bring Careers 2.0 to everyone on both sides of the hiring equation.
• Better exposure for our German candidates

  We have more than 3,600 German candidate profiles in our Careers 2.0 database, and in a job market where German tech hiring needs have more than doubled in the past three years, programmer jobs are in hot demand. (In fact, a couple of guys even showed up to our launch party wearing QR code t-shirts in their search for a developer.) Making a German site will hopefully give these candidates even more exposure to all great local companies—not just those who have a hiring manager who speaks English.

• Germany’s tech market has been growing exponentially

  It’s been estimated that 11 billion Euros are lost in possible output because German companies can’t hire enough engineers. And as the world’s largest resource for programmers (Google analytics counted more than 30 million unique visitors last month!), we hope to help solve that problem by connecting companies with the software developers they need.

• It was a good excuse for us to start accepting Euros

  If you log onto careers.stackoverflow.com/de, you’ll be prompted to pay for your job listings in Euros. If you’ve ever tried to buy something on a site in a foreign currency, you know what a pain it can be to deal with the exchange rates and credit card fees. Now we’re just more accessible for a lot more people. (We’re also now accepting the British Pound on the UK site.)

All in all, it’s been a great project for our team (though also a difficult one, as you’ll hear about in a future blog post) and localizing the site was an important way for us to support the German-speaking community on Stack Overflow.  As always, we’re open to hearing your feedback, so let us know what you think.

P.S. We know we missed some things, so if you speak German, feel free to check out the site and let us know what we still need to fix.

We’re growing like crazy! Between launching exciting new sites, developing new features and promotions for existing ones, and branching out geographically, Stack Exchange can use all the help it can get – so we’re currently hiring for seven (7!) different positions, from developers to designers to sales to… well, just look at the list yourself:

• Product Manager – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)
• Web Developer – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)
• Web Developer – Careers Team (New York)
• Senior Systems Administrator (telecommute or New York)
• Product Designer (telecommute or New York)
• Account Executive – Careers 2.0 (London, Denver, New York)
• Sales Representative – Inside Sales – Careers 2.0 (Denver, New York)

We’re dogfooding Careers for these of course, since who better to help make the software running Stack Exchange more awesome than the folks using Stack Exchange. Here are a few positions that are especially appropriate to our community:

Product Manager – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)

We’re looking for someone to help us design and build the next set of features and special projects for Stack Exchange.  We want someone with serious startup experience building and shipping products, from conception to deployment.  You’ll take ideas from us and the community, or come up with your own, and work with our designers and developers to get them shipped.

Web Developer – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)

We’re looking for a top-notch web developer for the Core Q&A team.  You’ll work directly on the engine that powers all the sites to ship new features, fix bugs, and scale and grow the sites.  We want someone with serious front-to-back web development experience (C# not required), a track record of getting stuff done, and a history of activity in the community.

Web Developer – Careers Team (New York)

We’re looking for more top-notch web developers to work on building Careers into the best place for developers to find a job, anywhere.  You’ll work on lots of new features, fix bugs, and help us decide the future of Careers.  We want someone with serious front-to-back web development experience (C# not required), a track record of getting stuff done, and a history of activity in the community.

Senior Systems Administrator (telecommute or New York)

We’re looking for a veteran Windows / Linux systems administrator to join our team.  You’ll help build out our infrastructure and keep it ahead of the growth curve.  We want someone with experience working with both Windows and Linux systems (emphasis on Windows), and a track record of taking on big challenges and delivering blog-worthy solutions.

Product Designer (telecommute or New York)

Last, but not least, we need a product designer.  You’ll work with Jin to help our developers and product managers design new features, create and implement full brand identities for new Stack Exchange sites, and help improve user experience across the network.  We want someone with a portfolio of web design and experience working directly with developers and product managers to design products and features.

Telecommute?

Most of these positions are open to the world: we want to hire the best people, wherever they are.  However, there are a few things you should be aware of:

1. You should be awesome at working remotely — self-motivated and aggressively communicative — to make sure you stay on the same page as the rest of your team
2. We still believe in getting teams together at least once a week to talk, and that generally happens between 1 – 5pm EDT.  You’ll need to be flexible with your hours
3. There may be some countries that are legally too difficult for us to work with…sorry!

A few positions are in-office only, but don’t worry: we have awesome offices.  In fact, a few people who started working remotely moved to New York just to get access to our catered lunches.  If you do want to move to New York (or our sales offices in Denver or London), we’ll assist you with relocation but you must already have the permanent right to work in the country of the office (US or UK).

Apply!

Each job has instructions to apply, and we’re hiring immediately.  If you see a job that might be a fit for you or someone you know, apply soon.  You can also always find a list of open positions at http://stackexchange.com/about/hiring, or click the “jobs” link in the footer of any Stack Exchange site.

Stack Overflow Careers 2.0 re-launched a year ago, and since then we’ve been steadily making improvements to it. While we’ve added a lot of new features for developers to find great jobs and show off their stuff, we’ve been a bit…neglectful of the employer side.

Well, not any more. We’ve just wrapped up a big set of changes to how companies find and track the perfect developers for their jobs. So if you’ve ever considered hiring a developer, read on for the details.

Some Background

Stack Overflow Careers launched with one goal: help developers find great jobs. We do that in two ways: developers can go looking for jobs on our jobs board, or they can create profiles showing off their work and let employers come to them.

From the employer’s point of view, these were two completely separate products. You either bought a job listing and collected applications, or you bought a search subscription and searched in our database. You could buy both, but they wouldn’t share any information between them.

No big deal, we thought. Well, it turns out that these products are really complementary and a lot of employers would like to use both. Job listings bring in lots of programmers who are actively looking for jobs, but they don’t reach the pool of really great candidates who already have jobs but may be willing to talk. Candidate search excels at the latter, since 25,000 of the 32,000 searchable profiles in Careers are people who are not actively looking for a job.

So we set out to bridge that gap and bring job listings and search together.

Messaging

First, we tackled messaging. We consolidated all of your messages into one simple new interface:

We’re obviously not breaking any new UI ground here: this looks and works like an email client. The important thing is that it combines everything into a nice, clean view: developers can easily see which jobs they’ve applied to and which companies have contacted them, and employers can see who they’ve contacted and who has applied to their jobs.

Candidate Tracker

The second piece we tackled was tracking candidates. Previously, when applications came in they just went into a big pile of resumes and cover letters, and you couldn’t do anything with them – not even sort them into “keep” and “reject” piles. Similarly, if you found an awesome developer via search, you could message them, but you couldn’t take notes or even easily keep track of their response. So we decided to combine these things together into a new candidate tracker:

We took a lot of cues from Trello (which we love – you should really try it if you haven’t): each candidate shows as a card with a picture, name, rating, and a short summary that you can create to keep all the candidates straight. You can drag them around between various states of the hiring process, and you can click them to see all their details:

From the expanded card, you can easily see all of a candidate’s information, make notes, and send messages. At each stage of the process you can either advance the candidate, or dismiss them from the list (always reversible, of course).

Candidate Search

This paved the way for integrating search with job listings. Now when you search, you’re searching to fill a particular position and all the candidates you save will be associated with that job. This makes it possible to keep two separate lists for two jobs (if, say, you’re looking for a front-end jQuery developer and a back-end python/mysql dev), and lets you associate a job listing with each search to get even more candidates.

This also let us cross off a frequent complaint: you’ll no longer see the same candidates showing up over and over again in searches. Once you’ve saved or dismissed a candidate, they’ll stop showing up in searches for that job, so you won’t have to keep paging past them to get to the new results.

Job Listings

Finally, we took another look at job listings and added some stats to help you track where all your applications came from:

This page now shows the number of views your job listing has gotten, what percentage of those people clicked a link in your job listing, and how many ended up applying for your job. We also show you where people came from, so if you posted the listing on our board, then tweeted it and posted it on your website you can actually see how many came from each place.

We also added embed codes for our fancy new apply button. That means that if you list your jobs on your company website, you can now directly embed a button to apply for the job with Careers. It opens a popup which lets developers apply to the job without ever leaving your website:

Conclusion

That’s it for this round! This was a big change on the back end, and it sets the stage for a lot more changes we’re going to jump into working on next. If you’re already a customer, let us know what you think on meta.stackoverflow.com or via email. If you’re a developer and you’d really like to work with some kickass fellow developers using Stack Overflow, email your boss or hiring manager and tell them to try Careers!