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See that mini job board in the right panel on your site? We are testing out a new feature on a couple Stack Exchange sites. It's a jobs widget that displays several geo-targeted job postings specific to your community. These job posts are contained in a small (we hope unobtrusive) display below the Community Bulletin on the sidebar. For this early version, job listings are provided from the database at Indeed.com. If your area of interest is not represented or the level of expertise of roles presented doesn't match what you'd find most useful, we want to know. This is very much a work in progress.

We think Cross Validated is the ideal candidate to try out this early version. You have specialized skills, your skills are in demand, and we suspect that many of you may be interested in exploring new career opportunities.

Please let us know what you think.

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    $\begingroup$ do you mean the "right side", and "stats-targeted"? $\endgroup$
    – David LeBauer
    Jun 20, 2012 at 23:14
  • $\begingroup$ My group has an opening for a scientific web programmer to help with some super neat projects - how can I get this posted on a relevant SE website, like webmasters.SE or even SO? Are they targeted using user-specific information? $\endgroup$
    – David LeBauer
    Jun 20, 2012 at 23:17
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    $\begingroup$ @David: I think by geo-targeted Seth means they are targeted to geographical location of the viewer/user, probably based on IP address. $\endgroup$
    – cardinal
    Jun 20, 2012 at 23:49
  • $\begingroup$ My $0.02, but, I think those job ads would flow a bit better on the page if swapped to appear below the community ads. $\endgroup$
    – cardinal
    Jun 20, 2012 at 23:51
  • $\begingroup$ At what are other sites is this being tested? $\endgroup$
    – David LeBauer
    Jun 21, 2012 at 14:38
  • $\begingroup$ @David cardinal is right. The jobs are community targeted and location based. We are working to improve the relevancy of the postings in this early version. Right now CV is the only site with it with one more expected to enjoy a test run soon. $\endgroup$
    – Seth Rogers
    Jun 21, 2012 at 14:46
  • $\begingroup$ I'd be curious how large the "location" area is. Our search is global, but our location is rural (small college town in the midwest). Even if not global, a reasonable search would include major cities and college towns within a 200 mile radius or so. In rural midwest, expanding from a 15mi radius to a 200 mi radius would increase the target population from about 100k to > 5 million. $\endgroup$
    – David LeBauer
    Jun 21, 2012 at 14:55
  • $\begingroup$ Seth, are the jobs notices displayed only for certain users? All I ever see in the new job board is the text "Related Jobs." I'm not using ad blockers. $\endgroup$
    – whuber Mod
    Jun 21, 2012 at 15:57
  • $\begingroup$ @whuber are you at home or work? corporate proxy or filtering in play here? $\endgroup$
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Jun 21, 2012 at 16:17
  • $\begingroup$ @Rebecca Home=work :-). No proxy or filtering. I use FireFox. As a test, I fired up IE: it does show the jobs, so it's probably a FireFox setting I'm not aware of. Sorry to bother you... (But since this may be a default setting, it might help to direct users to a page that helps them change it.) $\endgroup$
    – whuber Mod
    Jun 21, 2012 at 16:36
  • $\begingroup$ @whuber: As an additional data point, they do show for me on both Windows and Mac versions of Firefox with maximal privacy settings enabled. $\endgroup$
    – cardinal
    Jun 21, 2012 at 16:47
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    $\begingroup$ @Cardinal thanks. I have tracked this behavior to an ad blocker (which I had totally forgotten), so I was wrong in my initial query when I wrote there were no blockers involved. The solution is to enable ads from 'indeed.com'. $\endgroup$
    – whuber Mod
    Jun 21, 2012 at 16:50

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Just to be sure this is working, are there any jobs outside the US being advertised? I'm in Australia and I'd love to see any relevant jobs, but the nearest ones are in California (according to the jobs bar).

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  • $\begingroup$ Some locations, particularly outside the U.S., lack listings in this early version. Sorry mate! $\endgroup$
    – Seth Rogers
    Jul 13, 2012 at 15:19
  • $\begingroup$ @Seth: One way to potentially add value would be to make some element clickable that would take one to a longer list of options. Of course, I don't know the feasibility of this or whether your incentive structure is conducive to this. :) $\endgroup$
    – cardinal
    Jul 13, 2012 at 16:23
  • $\begingroup$ @cardinal good suggestion we can consider down the line. There is no incentive structure for this - it's for you guys! $\endgroup$
    – Seth Rogers
    Jul 13, 2012 at 17:32
  • $\begingroup$ @Seth: I have to imagine there is some (potential) revenue stream associated with this project and also the "risk" of taking users away from the network when following a link. To me, these, along with potential value added from access to more suggested positions, are all incentives/disincentives to weigh in a business decision. That's what I meant. :) $\endgroup$
    – cardinal
    Jul 13, 2012 at 17:46
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Please excuse me for promoting this, but I think our search also makes a good case study.

Despite broad advertisement, on sites including indeed.com, our opening for a web programmer has had a low response. perhaps it could use better targeting.

Specifically, I suspect the ad could benefit from good placement on a SE site. By good placement, I mean not only geo-targeted, but also tag targeted, content-targeted, and user targeted - many things that I am not familiar with, but the ad would appear to users based on a combination of tags and text in the page being viewed, and the tags and content of the users' contributions. I'd like any person with a history of posting good questions and answers to questions tagged ruby-on-rails to see the ad. Also, it would be good if it appeared on popular ruby-on-rails tagged questions. In addition to targeting the ruby-on-rails tag, I'd also like to target users who visited questions related to REST, MVC, and SQL.

I noticed that you are using Indeed.com; what is required to get an ad from there advertised on SE? For example, on indeed, our ad is any of the three identical results for "scientific web programmer" Urbana, IL.

Update: I just noticed that the job advert appeared in the sidebar of stats.SE! I am not sure how the behind-the-scenes targeting works, or if it has anything to do with this post or cookies in my browser, but it is nice to see. Although this isn't my target audience, it is nice to see the ad get some air. I can tell that there is some current targeting because I get different results when viewed in chrome's "incognito mode" than when I am logged in. In fact, in incognito mode, I don't see it the ad at all, and there appears to be little recycling (same ads throughout my browsing in both logged-in and incognito mode).

Here is an image of the site with my ad. I am curious what ads other people see:

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ On CV, the presented jobs rotate through a range of listings in the sidebar. @David, if you're looking to hire a developer Careers 2.0 on SO is a great place to find fantastic candidates. Currently, this test feature is not at all related to Careers 2.0. $\endgroup$
    – Seth Rogers
    Jun 21, 2012 at 14:54
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Is there any way to see ads which are not geo-targeted at one's current location? I am actually looking for a job, but I'm not wed on my current city.

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    $\begingroup$ I wouldn't worry too much, the radius seems to be on the order of 4000km. The content targeting seems to be the bigger issue, unless there are some new developments in the field that I'm unaware of (quite likely). Apparently there are a lot of physical therapists that frequent CV. $\endgroup$
    – cardinal
    Jun 25, 2012 at 13:38
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    $\begingroup$ Something weird is clearly going on with the backend; sometimes the targeting is eerily accurate and other times it's recommending jobs literally half a world away. Still, I saw position I'm actually interested in, so to +1 to this new feature (+2 if they hire me). $\endgroup$
    – Matt Krause
    Jun 28, 2012 at 0:49

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