Stack Overflow Careers was announced five years ago with a simple mission statement:
We believe that every professional programmer should have a job they love
To help you find a job you love, we need to match you with the right job at the right time. We do that by helping you create a profile that brings the right employers to you, and by showing you relevant job ads from our job board on Stack Overflow. With over 6,000 companies that advertise on Stack Overflow Careers, we’re getting closer to our goal of having a great job for every developer.
Until today, the job ads that we show on Stack Overflow were pretty stupid: they targeted solely based on location, and ignored all the other information about what you’re looking for and what kind of job it is. They didn’t even care about whether the job was in a technology that you were interested in. So today* we’re launching the first step in showing you jobs that we think are an actual match for you.
*If you just ran to a question to see how targeted the jobs were and left disappointed, don’t worry. This feature is just launching today and most employers haven’t had a chance to target their jobs yet. You’ll see the difference over the coming months.
Developer Types, Tech Ecosystems, and Tech Tags
Many of you will start noticing that the jobs you see aren’t just in your area, but are related to the question you’re viewing, a question you’ve answered, or something you’ve asked about. We’re using this little bit of data, along with the location data we were already using, to predict what type of job you’re more likely to want to apply to. We then do some predictive modeling based on this information to target mobile jobs at mobile devs, front-end web development jobs at front-end devs, and even more complex stuff based on technology stack and specific tags.
It’s difficult to show you an example of a targeted ad. We haven’t changed much about the ad design or even how the job is displayed in the ads. However, we can show you the other side, how the employer is targeting their jobs.
This is all organized into three tiers of targeting criteria:
- Developer Types: The broadest description of a developer.
- Technology Ecosystems: A narrower description, best described as tag clusters. Python includes frameworks like Django and Flask. Cloud (back end) implies knowledge of AWS, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, etc.
- Stack Overflow Tags: The most finely-grained descriptor. These draw straight from the top 1,000 most popular tags on Stack Overflow.
It’s really that simple. Once employers fill out a targeting profile for a job, we’ll try and predict which of those jobs you’ll be interested in.
Fine, but these are just ads. Why should I care?
Hopefully this doesn’t change much about how you use Stack Overflow in your daily life. Job ads are only a small part of our page content, but we hope this launch will improve your odds of seeing the right job opportunity at the right time. So far it appears to be working. Initial testing of targeted jobs over the past few months have demonstrated significant progress toward our goal of showing relevant job ads to each developer, as clickthrough rates increased 21-30%. Not bad for a V1!
We also want to let you know exactly how we’re targeting jobs, so our newly created data team will be talking about building out the infrastructure for this project, and all the details of what went into it. You can follow these posts on Kevin Montrose’s blog starting today. Jason Punyon will also be adding to this series later this week and next.
Additionally, if you want to see your personal prediction data, or if you want to disable predictions, you can do that from the user preferences page.
This sounds cool; I want to use it to hire a developer!
If you want more details on how this works for employers, go visit our Stack Overflow Careers blog. If you want to dive right in, you can post a job now and fill out a targeting profile. And if you already have a job running, you can edit it to add targeting for the rest of its run.
That’s it! As always, if you have questions or comments feel free to post on Meta Stack Exchange in the ‘Careers’ tag.
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33 Comments
I’d like to block certain tags. The system detected strong SQL activity for me but I’d never consider taking a database job. It’s not my career path.
.NET is about as strong as SQL according to the system. .NET is my focus. That means that half of the job ad slots are wasted.
My feedback for so careers is that it doesn’t work..it really doesn’t. We’ve paid for 2 “ad” runs and never get any hits. Sure it may depend on what your company is offering but I think there is still a lot of work to do on careers. The UI is hard to follow when your role is both a person logged in looking for a career AND your role is also an employer looking for someone to hire.
What about those who are stuck using a technology they don’t love? They spend most of their time in those tags, but if they take another job, maybe they want something completely different than what they are doing now.
@Trevor Nothing prevents you from looking for other jobs, right? I think it is a fair assumption of StackExchange that it is easiest for you to find a job in tags that you were/are most active in.
This seems good. That based on the questions and tags I used in my questions I will be able to see more targeted jobs – is it what it’s all about? Did I get it right? I think it makes sense!.
Will this happen automatically?
In general good luck to StackOverflow.
although indeed it is fair comment that although I maybe posting questions using some tag now, I might be interested to get job in different area.
Another feedback I would like to give SO careers. Is the need for online stack overflow CV? I mean I find it mundane to create a new CV for myself for each and every place. That is why I have written all that suff in my original CV (pdf file), and use it when applying. I find it mundane to create yet another CV be it even on Stack overflow. Did you really consider the need for Careers profiles on SO where users create their CV I mean?
@Gio Yes. The fact that a question you asked is a question you also viewed, those tags will affect the type of jobs you’ll see in the ads.
@Trevor It’s certainly not perfect. Ideally in the future you could confirm/edit the data that informs types of ads you see as easily as you can search for jobs on SO Careers itself. We’re not there ye.
I thought that what `Careers 2.0` was for.
I prefer applying for jobs on Careers than any other site. Just wish more companies would advertise. My tags are rather… esoteric by main stream standards I guess.
I’m a big fan – I got my current position through Careers 2.0. Are the same ads now fed through to the mobile apps?
Blocking seems important. You might want a non Perl job because you’re sick of Perl because you spend so much time looking for help with Perl related problems; the last thing you want is “Hey! Love Perl? You’re going to love working at….PerlWorld!!!!”
I really like that we can download our personal data. Love the transparency.
It’s about darn time that Stack Exchange has finally implemented this! I’ve been waiting for better ad targeting *for years*! I look forward to seeing how well the new targeting algorithms do! :D
Free personal data, huzzah! I can totally see someone building up a fictional character sheet from this!
Editors, please give the user preference page more prominence in the article.
very good post
I strongly advocate Trevors notion. What if one searches for jobs in less active tags. The best is to also evaluate on which job offers one actually clicked and strongly gear future results towards this direct exhibition of interest. And also to aim a bit wider and also show ads that others find useful or are in other tags.
Good move. Most of the ads I see only seem to care about the country I live in, and the plans to be able to block some types are a must methinks.
This sounds like a great idea – but all the targeting options seem focused on high-level development. No options for embedded developer jobs for those of us not interested in mobile or web stuff?
Why don’t just ask instead of predicting?
I’m glad to see System Administration in the dropdown (even though the dropdown’s title is Developer Types). Hopefully this will make it easier to actually find those rare postings on Careers because as it is now, it’s difficult.
Why is my prediction data available for download as a .json file rather than viewable online? I’m not a web-dev so other than knowing JSON exists I know little about it!
Also it’s all very well saying “your data is always available to view” but if I have no idea what the data means, how does this help me.
“FullStackWebPHP”: 0.0112637873502739
What does that mean? That there’s a 1.1% chance I’d be good at PHP?!
@brian Yeah, putting that in developer type doesn’t make a lot of sense to you and me, but it does for recruiters.
@Trevor @Trilarion I think these are actually two separate points. To Trevor’s point, yes. This is good at observing behavior, but isn’t always 100% correct because you don’t directly give us intent. Just because you work in Java, doesn’t mean you want another Java job. Over time, we’ll get better at this.
To Trilarion’s point, we do have plans to bring in data from your actual job searches as well. There is considerably less data there than say, browsing questions on Stack Overflow, so we started at the fat side of the funnel. Everything you mentioned though are experiments we do plan on running to make this smarter.
These sounds good as a first step but as @Trevor mentioned working in or with a disliked technology can skew the posts in the wrong direction for a particular candidate. If the candidate has a profile on careers, why not use there disliked technology list as a way to help mitigate that problem. For that matter why not use the liked technology list as well?
As a backend/fullstack developer I frequently ask questions about javascript, because that is not my strongest part. Thus I most often get job offers for working in the frontend, which is not my interest at the moment. I can also see this reflected in the tags (via downloading my data); javascript is the highest tag. The kinds of webdev start with fullstack, followed by frontend, and backend is 0. As such, it is quite useless for me.
i think the recruitment just give the location is to they can explain what they are doing face to face with this new employer
nice feature.
I like very much hope that labels help us find a specific job for every need search
It is so helpfull! I do not believe I have read through anything
like this before. What a great idea!
My experience so far hasn’t been great as a candidate. I got offers from Mobile startups and after knowing about my whereabouts they just left the trail. Which means that many of them do not notice before contacting a candidate.
Good article thank you
To find the right job is very essential, I think and thanks stack for bringing out this point.