This is interesting Joel is just now discovering this.
As the co-founding CTO of Hotjobs.com, we provided this functionality on the very first version of Hotjobs in 1996, and subsequently ended up purchasing Resumix to provide a very in depth technical solution to allow employers this exact functionality you're describing.
Of course, we had tens of millions of resumes in every possible industry imaginable all searchable through a very robust search interface that did all sorts of fancy lexical analysis and data extraction from random resume formats.
Over the last 13 years, thousands upon thousands of people have been hired through the exact mechanism you're describing.
Not to take anything away from hotjobs, but I would argue that the real value Stack overflow careers offers is the fact that an employer can not only see your CV, but at least somewhat determine your level of expertise through your stack overflow account/reputation.
I imagine Joel believes this has more value then just the data extracted from a resume.
nothing at all, but sadly, I know some employers(HR people, etc) probably don't even go through that much trouble in the screening process. If you are paying for stackoverflow to list you you know the employers on the other end are discerning enough to actually care about your stackoverflow rep. This is the same value provided by GitHub's job profile.
I think Joel's post's only point was to talk again about the Careers option on StackOverflow, not necessarily that it was new. Well, it was presented as a new thing to show his product under a good light.
As the co-founding CTO of Hotjobs.com, we provided this functionality on the very first version of Hotjobs in 1996, and subsequently ended up purchasing Resumix to provide a very in depth technical solution to allow employers this exact functionality you're describing.
Of course, we had tens of millions of resumes in every possible industry imaginable all searchable through a very robust search interface that did all sorts of fancy lexical analysis and data extraction from random resume formats.
Over the last 13 years, thousands upon thousands of people have been hired through the exact mechanism you're describing.