[scottc]

I had a great experience about 3 years ago. It was amazing.

First, SO Careers 1.0 came to a halt, they made a few changes in 2.0, they changed it to an invite-only system as opposed to a premium subscription service. They best part of all, they reimbursed everyone who had previously paid. Here was the blog post about it: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/careers-2-0-launches/

It was great, I was getting several requests per week for a while, and it even helped me land a job across the country.

All that being said, I haven't kept my SO Careers profile up to date lately, and haven't had many inquiries in a while.

I do highly recommend it.

[avinassh]

Is it important to have high SE rep points for getting noticed from recruiters?

(I have started using recently, have only 1k rep)

[Shog9]

Not really. The usual guidelines are "have a portfolio of some sort" - IOW, something you can use to demonstrate what you know instead of just leaning on a sad list of keywords. That can be a nice SO profile, but could also be a solid open source project or well-written blog.

If you do plan on showing off your SO profile, don't get hung up on rep - well-written answers that demonstrate mastery of a subject are a lot more useful than an arbitrary number.

[ben336]

That is actually (surprisingly) not made super prominent on a users profile page. There is a place to list questions/answers that you felt were good representations of your skill/knowledge