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Is Stack Overflow profile relevant in resume?

Madza on October 19, 2020

I've seen some people including their SO profiles in their resumes. They believe it would show the employer you're an active member of the developm...
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John Colagioia (he/him) • Edited

Think of it like education: It's important if it's one of the stronger aspects about your career to date, but less useful in the face of other experience that you can showcase.

That's obviously unclear, because every job application is different. But to give a more concrete example, if you're applying to a Ruby on Rails shop and you happen to answer a lot of Rails questions, they're going to want to see that. By contrast, if you asked one question, once, it's probably not worth mentioning.

Personally, I just keep links to Stack Overflow, GitHub, and social media on my personal webpage and direct people there in my cover letter. Some companies get excited about it, some don't care. Again, the analogy is education: At my age, nobody cares about my degree (though having one gets me through some screening), but for your first job, your school and GPA might be the majority of your reputation.

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Chris Boles

Totally agree. Everything in your resume should have some relevance to the job description.

Like my GitHub profile is more geared towards personal projects than contributing to open source. So, while I always include it, it just depends on how much I include.

You should be able to explain why every line on your resume is important for them to read.

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Jen Miller

You should be able to explain why every line on your resume is important for them to read.

I very much agree on this.

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ItsASine (Kayla)

Personally, I just keep links to Stack Overflow, GitHub, and social media on my personal webpage and direct people there in my cover letter.

This!

I know some people will see my username tends to be ItsASine for dev things and hunt, so I'll save them the trouble and link to them on my sites, but the resume is better to keep to just what will make you look good. I'm sure there are interviewers out there that want to judge everyone by their SO ranks, but unless you're active in your tech stack's questions, it's not going to be a huge plus to keep on the resume.

Although, even though my Github is meh, I know a lot of hiring managers would want to see it, so I include a reference to it under my personal site link. But that's more because I assume no one is going to go to my website so I at least want to convey that my Github profile exists.

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Ben Halpern

If you have a relevant online profile: Flaunt it. I think it's only a positive to demonstrate some community involvement unless the rest of your resumé speaks for itself in an incredibly obvious way.

For better or worse I think public activity is helpful on resumés.

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Louis Low

DEV leader! DEV leader! DEV leader! DEV leader! DEV leader!

cute cat with big eyes

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Médéric Burlet

This is something I come across often.
I have people putting their SO profile on their application but when I check the profile its have one question and that is it.
I also have people putting their Github profile where there is one repo of just a HTML test page.

When I recruit I go in the optic of don't add it if it doesnt boost your profile. There is no point adding a github that has one repo. If you github has personal projects, open source collabs and more then go for it.

Same for SO, If your profile does not have anything interesting to add to your profile don't add it.

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Louis Low • Edited

Not necessary in my living country. The Tech recruiter in this country is quite lazy and has imposter syndrome. Stackoverflow, dev.to, IBM CallForCode, etc. are too much for them to read.

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Andrew Baisden

I find that many recruiters are like that. I have my social media, github and portfolio links at the top of my resume and the recruiter still asks me if I have those profiles. So they could not even be bothered to open the resume they asked me to send...

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Louis Low • Edited

Absolutely! These recruiters are trying to make conversation to make a scene...

You are being recruited!

...and they've done their recruiting job to make them feel better. In the end, they are just regular lazy office boys or girls making phone calls, texting, some paperwork, trying to blend in into the tech world and question us like an idiot with a hardcoded list.

Whenever I get such an unbelievable response from the recruiter via any communication mediums. I usually mock them with...

Sorry, you are just messing with a very intelligent person. But you are not. You are welcome.

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Julian Mojico

That's very humble from you. Remember, Intelligence does not make you wise.

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johannchopin

I have +5k on SO and this Is really a huge value as a developer. Indeed ALL the developers use SO at least once a month and probably have an account. Having a nice amount of reputation easily impress them even you are a junior.

You easily also get contacted by other developer to start a project (I got contacted by 2 start-up in the pass 3month) .

So I really recommand you to start answer questions and earn reps 😉 then be proud of it and share it to the recruiters.

In my case I have it in the navbar of my website cv.johannchopin.fr.

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Bobby Iliev

My personal opinion is that with StackOverflow's recent reputation of being so negative lately, a lot of people feel reluctant to post there. I think that other communities like DEV, DevDojo, and the DigitalOcean community which are much more welcoming, so I wouldn't worry too much about my StackOverflow profile.

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Jen Miller • Edited

hmm, this is a really interesting question,

In many companies, the candidate review process includes a review of the resume by other developers. When evaluating candidates, I always look at their online website and github if provided. If the SO profile is there, I sometimes do a quick look.

I don't like the idea of just using SO rank as a measure of experience though. I think if your SO involvement can communicate something of value, such as, experience, compassion for helping others, or a carving for learning more...all that helps (Github and sites like dev.to are other good sites).

Using social media to evaluate candidates is tricky. Developers are people and thus and their evaluation of a candidate can swayed by personal beliefs on topics and other things not applicable to their work.

I don't think a resume should be a dumping ground of everything someone has done. I think it has to be organized in a meaningful way to show recruiters and reviewers that you are a potential candidate for the job. If SO is another point of experience in your life that could show this, then put it down.

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Zohar Peled

Personally, I think you shouldn't include links to SO or Dev (or whatever) in your resume, unless you're really short on actual industry experience relevant to the job you're posting for but you have some SO/Dev/other publicly published content that shows you do know your stuff. I would include links to a personal website and/or SO/Dev/other in your linkedin profile, though. When an employer/recruiter reads your resume, they're not interested in links, they're interested in what's in front of their eyes. Later, if you've passed that initial screening, they will look you up - and then they might be tempted to learn about your community activity.

If you're applying to a job on a company that's known for encouraging their employees to be involved in the community - even if it's not directly related to the developers community - then it might be a good idea to mention you're volunteering your time and knowledge to help fellow developers.

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Andrei Gatej

In my case, it’s one of the strongest points. But it also reflects what kind of work I’d like to do

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Lukas Klinzing

Yes. I have around 6k stars and got multiple offers including from Facebook. My current employment is also because of my SO profile.