How to find candidates on Stack Overflow

If you are IT recruiter you are good or bad, nothing between. If you are good, then what you really do, what you live for, is solving problems how to find the right candidate. If you are bad recruiter, you probably don’t know what Stack Overflow is or you are just starting with IT hiring.

What is Stack Overflow?
In software, a stack overflow occurs when the stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many factors, including the programming language, machine architecture, multi-threading, and amount of available memory. When a program attempts to use more space than is available on the call stack (that is, when it attempts to access memory beyond the call stack's bounds, which is essentially a buffer overflow), the stack is said to overflow, typically resulting in a program crash.

Ok, probably you don’t understand a word, but that’s ok, because that was software explanation and you don’t need to know that. But I have your attention now, right? :)

I am going to tell you how to use "x-ray search" and more about the website http://stackoverflow.com

Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It’s home of the world's best developers. 

On average, more than 25M developers visit Stack Overflow each month. Yes, you are reading right, its 25 million developers.

Hiring without additional advanced searches and tools the results wouldn’t be as exhaustive. If you know how, you will have more time for other activities in work.

Stack Overflow vs LinkedIn

People on LinkedIn are tired with all these invites from recruiters and fake profiles. A benefit of this site is the candidate may not be contacted by recruiters/head-hunters as often as lots of recruiters down now about them and these candidates are not so visible on LinkedIn.


X-Ray and search strings

These strings are for Google search

Basic string for a search

site:stackoverflow.com/users "JavaScript" "Prague"

If you use the first string, the first profile that is going to pop-up is Kaltas ( http://stackoverflow.com/users/391064/kaltas ). You are not going to find his email, but when you click on his website you will find his social websites. You can discover different ways to contact the candidate. With luck and your brain you can do a little searching in order to get full details on a potential candidate or his contact details.

More advanced string

site:stackoverflow.com/users "JavaScript" "Prague" intext:"website * *(com|net|me)"-"0 reputation"

Note: This string removes profiles with no reputation and with no website 

On Stack Overflow, users gain reputation points when other software engineers vote on their questions, answers etc. People with high reputations on Stack Overflow are basically software engineers, who ask good questions and provide helpful answers to other developers’ questions.

For example, here is a search for users who mention JavaScript and who have a reputation rank of 1,000 or higher. There is no upper limit for reputation!

site:stackoverflow.com/users "1000.. reputation" JavaScript ("location * Prague" | "location * Ostrava" | "location * Brno" )

Don’t forget: not everyone is going to mention the city you’re looking to find people in on their profile. 

Sourcing by Badges

You can also search for users based on the badges they’ve earned through various actions like asking, answering questions and for moderation thing etc). Badges appear on your profile page, flair and your posts.

The entire list of badges is here

site:stackoverflow.com/users "great answer" JavaScript ("location * Prague" | "location * Ostrava" | "location * Brno" )

Some more tips for you:


If you would like to X-Ray the bio’s of the candidate you can use this string

site:careers.stackoverflow.com -inurl:jobs (add some keywords)

for example:

site:careers.stackoverflow.com -inurl:jobs ROR "Ruby on Rails" Ruby



To find the most recent profiles you can search for

site:careers.stackoverflow.com -inurl:jobs profile “updated * yesterday“

site:careers.stackoverflow.com -inurl:jobs profile updated ..7 days ago



View the dates when the profiles was last updated by using something like

site:careers.stackoverflow.com -inurl:jobs profile updated on * * *

If you have any interesting tip for the string let me know in the comments or over the Twitter, I am still learning new things and I am ready to be surprised. Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.