First, it's not "this one particular Q&A board" IMO - StackOverflow is now in the top 600 largest sites on the web, and the central hub for programming discussion.
I would consider somebody else if they gave a sufficiently compelling reason, but again when making the decision about where to focus time (think 20 - 30 resumes a day coming in) it's an easy way to qualify people.
I've made over 20,000 posts in programming forums, most of which have been around a decade or more, but none at Stack Overflow. Filtering resumes by having an account at a single specific site, no matter how popular that site, is rather arbitrary.
As for "Filtering resumes by having an account at a single specific site. . . is rather arbitrary":
I never in my post say that's the only mechanism we use to qualify - we get candidates from all over the usual candidates (monster / cb / hotjobs / dice / etc) but we use SO to help qualify.
I see lots of value in SO when trying to filter through the HUGE amount of resumes that come through the door.
I hire lots of technical people, this system works for me.
Their business model is charging $500/month to hiring managers for access to candidates and slapping in some advertising.
The fact that they’re out on the road raising VC says that they’re probably having a lot of success in this model because it works for others too.
StackOverflow centralizes, VERY VERY SUCCESSFULLY, a huge talent pool of programmers.
And it gives hiring managers a lot of data that is hard to collect (multiplied x30 resumes a day) from a variety of “programming forums” to make hiring decisions.
Are you hiring people to support your developers or are you hiring developers? I am sure a lot of people answering questions on SO are great developers, just as I am equally sure that there are more great developers out there working on software that have never answered a SO question.
