Like the title says, can your Stack Overflow Careers profile be used as an official resume? Is it professional?
asked Oct 3, 2014 at 17:54
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Personally as someone who handles hiring software devs I would no accept it. Just comes across as lazy. (not mean, just being honest) IE not professional– Eric J FisherOct 3, 2014 at 18:26
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True software engineering "lazy" solution to this problem would be to design a solution that reads your SO profile page and uses the information found there to generate a nicely formatted resume. Then, whenever you update your SO career profile you just rerun your SO-to-resume compiler.– BrandinOct 4, 2014 at 14:19
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5 Answers
can your Stack Overflow Careers profile be used as an official resume?
Yes you can. You can choose to use anything you like as your resume.
Is it professional?
Not in my mind.
Look around and see what kind of information resumes are intended to provide.
Remember that readers of resumes generally want straightforward simplicity. They don't want to puzzle through unfamiliar formats.
Then ask yourself if your Stack Overflow Career profile presents the experience that you would want a potential boss to go through, and if it puts you in your best light.
answered Oct 3, 2014 at 19:50
I'm not sure the word "official" can reasonably be applied to a resume. There's no central authority regulating what a resume should look like.
The question isn't whether it's "official", it's whether potential employers will accept it. My suspicion is that most won't. Remember that recruiters and employers process large numbers of resumes (perhaps dozens or hundreds for each job). Providing a resume in the format they expect makes their job easier -- and you really want to make their job easier. Failing to do so makes it very easy for them to move on to the next candidate.
My own resume includes the URL of a web page that includes a link to my SO profile. A direct link to your profile might also be reasonable.
I would say no. Most of recruiters / HR personnal would still expect to see your CV in a traditional printable format. However, it is worth including a link in it to your SO Careers page. That's what I did; it seems that recruiters find it fascinating and it helps me stand out of the crowd. (This is just a feeling though, with no facts to back it up. The length and breadth of my professional experience and the tone of my CV seems to stand out of the crowd by itself - for better or worse -, so it is hard to gauge the effect of the SO Careers link in isolation.)
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1+1: The SO Careers profile actually contains a resume which has a link from which you can create a pdf. I would say that could serve as an official resume with a proper cover letter attached, but a standard SO profile is not even nearly informative enough to even pretend to be a resume. Personally my SO careers resume is the most complete resume I have on file anywhere, but I still do not use it by itself. I typically have a tailored resume to the position I'm applying for and then provide a link to the careers resume either at the end or during an interview. Oct 3, 2014 at 19:39
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I always think more of a candidate that submits this format, as it says lots to me about them besides their skill in coding. I rarely get it as the first format, though. Oct 5, 2014 at 18:48
Keep in mind that a certain amount of the resume generation and application process is showing that you care enough and are clued in enough about the position to spend time preparing the material for the reader.
Providing it in a way that the reader can receive and comprehend it is the first step. I know of very few application options where you can just paste a web link into the application and you can't easily print out the Careers page and hand it off.
If what you are doing is printing the SO Careers page or just saving it as HTML and pasting into the job opportunity application page - be prepared for the formatting to be pretty odd looking, and likely to communicate "I didn't really bother to try hard to make this readable".
OTOH, if you've spent a lot of time carefully crafting your experience and job description stuff on Careers, there's no reason you can't reformat all of that into a pretty decent resume - they ask all the normal resume type information and more. Just make sure you go with a standard resume format as you cut/copy/paste the resume together.
I generally go the other way - I use my resume to build my Stack Overflow Careers page... not the other way around.
answered Oct 4, 2014 at 2:07
If you go to your Careers profile you will see the "create PDF" button. The resulting PDF is actually pretty nice CV, provided your profile is up-to-date and full with relevant data. If you are concerned that the potential employer will think that you are too lazy to create your own CV, but still want to show off your SE profile, just put a link to your profile at the CV header.
