Hiring on Craigslist experiment with interesting results

http://karmabond.com/pages/hiring-on-craigslist-without-email-overload

by sanych • 16 years ago

44 42 16 years ago

I built a site that should improve process of hiring on Craiglist. First test results look promising. I plan to pursue couple local HR agencies to give it a try and run couple more tests for other professions. Any other ideas on what is the most effective way to prove or disprove this concept quickly?

awa• 16 years ago

If I was looking for a job and found a job ad with no contact information, I would see it possibly as spam/scam/non-serious recruiting activity unless I have had heard of the company (in that case I would be looking at their career section anyways).

sanych• 16 years ago

I know, gaining trust is a huge issue for me. Only Google can get away with doing billboards across highway :)

loupgarou213• 16 years ago

I'd have to agree with you there. I also remember the last time I was out of work, any job listings without contact info was removed pretty quickly as spam. The job I did end up taking didn't list the company name, which actually kept me from applying for the job for two weeks. I did end up applying in the end (mostly because I wasn't seeing very many jobs that appealed to me, and the job description for this one did look good.) Prospective employees need to learn how to properly apply for jobs, but by the same token, employers need to learn how to properly post their job openings.

jcapote• 16 years ago

Especially if they wanted to charge me $1 for applying...

zeynel1• 16 years ago

"I decided to create a fake job listing..."

He, in turn, wasted serious applicants' time who took time to write good cover letters to reply to his fake job listing. I guess, researcher's dilemma.

davidmurphy• 16 years ago

yeah, this is not cool IMHO.

semanticist• 16 years ago

Running it in different cities skews the results - would have been better to run multiple trials in the same city.

I'm also not sure that counting applicants as a proportion of the unemployed in a city makes sense. I'm not unemployed, but I am looking for a new job. I also technically don't live in the city/district I work in.

That's not to say that those techniques won't work as filters, but the percentages quoted are basically just made-up numbers.

justinph• 16 years ago

He asked for a security deposit? Yeah, just a little bit fishy. There's no way in hell I would apply for a job that wanted me to pay to apply. Totally bogus.

petesalty• 16 years ago

Yeah, IANAL but my guess this is pretty illegal in most states. If it wasn't you'd be seeing a lot more companies doing it.

paulgb• 16 years ago

If more companies did it, some unscrupulous users would abuse it by posting fake listings and not returning the money.

potatolicious• 16 years ago

+ fake company name (presumably fake website?), no background info on Google (after all, it's fake), no background on founders... etc.

I would've sailed right past that posting too.

cabalamat• 16 years ago

> There's no way in hell I would apply for a job that wanted me to pay to apply. Totally bogus.

Me neither. It screams SCAM at me. It'd be illegal in the UK, as well.

FreeKill• 16 years ago

This article was ridiculous. Maybe the people who would apply figured your job wasn't worth a $1 when they are unemployed?

mynameishere• 16 years ago

You can be marked as spam/fraud 95 percent of the time by behaving exactly like a spammer/fraudster.

metra• 16 years ago

I wonder how this experiment would have turned out if all the applicants decided to play the same game.

- Submit their resume but with a name only. You have to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever to find the contact information.

- The employer will only receive contact information if he puts in a $1 security deposit in the prospective employee's bank account.

blueben• 16 years ago

There are thousands of applicants for every job. They aren't exactly in a position of power.

pyre2• 16 years ago

He did say all the applicants, not just a handful of them.

derefr• 16 years ago

> Is it difficult to write a few words that show you have taken the time to visit our website and understand the job description?

If they're finding you through an advertisement, that means that they didn't know or care who you were until they read the ad. At that point, yes, it's a bit hard. It's not hard because they need to regurgitate facts you gave them—that's the easy part. The hard part is being enthusiastic in the "I always wanted to work for you; I know exactly what you do, and I know that it's exactly what I want to do, even though I've never used any of your products or services" sense. It's too emotionally draining to write ten of those in a row.

megablast2• 16 years ago

Depends on the job. If you work at a general office position, why the hell should you care what hobbies the CEO has, or what your boss enjoys collecting, or the fact that your company deals in gold paper clips to rich industrialists.

For most jobs, this isn't important.

Never trust advice from recruiters.

georgieporgie3• 16 years ago

> Is it difficult to write a few words that show you have taken the time to visit our website and understand the job description?

As another commenter noted, yes, it's far too draining to research a company and manufacture a B.S. cover letter. Look, we're professionals here. I applied to your position because it looks like a good fit for my skills. I'm sorry that you have to dig through others who spammed you with unrelated email, but that's really not my problem. Do you want you corporate ego stroked, or do you want a qualified applicant who will make you money?

Regarding the $1, all I can say is, "wow." I wouldn't touch that Craigslist posting with a ten foot pole. I would also immediately flag it as a scam. It reminds me an awful lot of the "job placement" companies I saw crop up back in the Tech Bubble Crash, who promised you access to thousands of jobs if you just pay their subscription fee. I really dislike companies which prey on the unemployed and desperate.

Batsu• 16 years ago

> As another commenter noted, yes, it's far too draining to research a company and manufacture a B.S. cover letter. Look, we're professionals here. I applied to your position because it looks like a good fit for my skills. I'm sorry that you have to dig through others who spammed you with unrelated email, but that's really not my problem. Do you want you corporate ego stroked, or do you want a qualified applicant who will make you money?

Agree completely. As far as I'm concerned, unless you really interest me, I should spend about as much time researching your company as you will reading my resume.

kenjackson2• 16 years ago

Then why send the resume at all? If you have little interest in the company, have no interest to spend 5 minutes writing a cover letter, and expect they'll only spend 10s looking at your resume, why bother sending it?

earl• 16 years ago

Note that the author of the blog post apparently works for karmabond, so I'd classify this almost as a devious advertisement for their escrow services, or whatever it is they do.

In any case, regarding the gist of the article, let me explain how job seeking works as a job seeker:

I send custom cover letters to each and every company that I apply to. This take at least an hour and often much longer per company: I read about the company, executive bios, executive bios on crunchbase, scan techcrunch articles, check glassdoor, google the company a bit, see what job I think I'd be interested in, etc. I then write a custom cover letter explaining my background as it pertains to their job and why I think I'd be a good fit for them.

When this works, it works well. On the other hand, I'd say 75 percent or more of phone screens clearly couldn't be arsed to read my cover letter before getting on the phone with me. If it's too much bother to read one page of text about a candidate before getting on the phone with me, then I'm not interested. Sorry. On the other hand, when deciding between offers a couple years ago, the fact that the person on the phone had read my cover letter and thought about what I said helped tip the balance in favor of Scribd.

ps -- netflix recruiters? The reason I'm ignoring your calls now is when I sent you a well thought out cover letter 2 years ago, you couldn't even be bothered to email back. People remember.

So when Alex whines that applicants don't send custom cover letters, well, the reason is simple: too much work since the vast majority of employers don't bother to read them. He apparently doesn't understand that job seekers have finite time and job searching is a triage process -- where can I aply that I will like the most with the highest probability of succeeding. So yes, it is difficult to invest a couple hours per company and even if you do, in the majority of cases, you will never hear back. Not even a simple, "Thanks for applying, we received your application, but we don't think you're a good fit at this time" email.

As for sending $1 to some website I've never heard of, hah. Alex must be out of his mind to think people would do that.

angelbob• 16 years ago

On the other hand, when deciding between offers a couple years ago, the fact that the person on the phone had read my cover letter and thought about what I said helped tip the balance in favor of Scribd

Scribd has at least one really, really fabulous recruiter. They didn't hire me, but not for that reason (and their reasons were good, at the time).

dkarl2• 16 years ago

I'd say 75 percent or more of phone screens clearly couldn't be arsed to read my cover letter before getting on the phone with me.

100% of the time I've been asked to do a phone screen, I've been given a resume but no cover letter. You can't count on the cover letter getting past HR.

ghshephard• 16 years ago

Agreed - I've done over 300 interviews / and probably north of 600 phone screens in the last six years - I'm struggling to recall if I've ever seen a cover letter, even once.

wisty• 16 years ago

Using arbitrary criteria to prune down candidates is stupid. I can see how the deposit will thin out unqualified candidates more than qualified ones, but you will still lose good candidates who think that the deposit is just plain dodgy.

On the other hand, I can see why you wouldn't want to hire anyone who couldn't be bothered googling the company they are applying for.

Depending on the position, you could also leave the job ad off your website, and expect the candidate to cold call you. That wouldn't be great for screening developers, but it would be fantastic for hiring anyone who's expected to show initiative in interacting with people. Yeah ... developers have to interact with people too, but there's a balance to strike - they might just think you're idiots who can't be bothered editing a web page.

loupgarou213• 16 years ago

I'm a big advocate of making your cover letter and resume fit you personally, but I've got to say, I think you're spending too much time on your cover letter. Researching a company in-depth is a good idea before an interview, but when you're just applying to a company, the cover letter shouldn't take more than about 15 minutes to research and put together.

For me, I prefer to keep my cover letter to three paragraphs. One explains how I found the company and what job opening I'm applying for. One explains a little of my background. One explains why I think I'd be a good fit for the company and the job opening. If I know the person that will be receiving the cover letter, I address them directly, otherwise I come up with a generic salutation or sometimes leave the salutation off all together.

I like to keep the cover letter short enough to read in a few seconds while having enough information to let the person that initially goes through the resumes easily determine whether or not I'm a good candidate.

jemfinch• 16 years ago

Maybe I've only ever lived in secondary markets, but in my experience, job listings on Craigslist aren't worth my time even to look at. None of the companies there impress me or make me want to contact them. Extrapolating from my experience, it would seem that in all but a few markets, Craigslist job ads are already scraping the bottom of the barrel, at least when it comes to technical talent.

harshpotatoes2• 16 years ago

In Seattle, craigslist is kinda the way to apply for jobs. I've found that 99% of the times I applied through the careers section of a company's website, I received no response. Applying through craigslist was the only way I ever got an interview over my 9 month long job hunt, and it was how I got my current job.

While I was at a job interview for one company, I was eavesdropping on the receptionist. Some people had decided to cold call the company to see if they could apply to any job openings. The receptionist calmly responded, that they weren't accepting any resumes at the moment, but any job openings would be posted on craigslist.

So yeah. While I imagine most cities are probably more bottom of the barrel stuff, in a select few cities craigslist is almost necessary for a job-seeker.

rpledge• 16 years ago

Isn't the whole "pay to apply" the business model of http://localbacon.com

Edit: seems that localbacon isn't what it used to be... http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/22/jibe-localbacon-relaunch/

samd• 16 years ago

I think their original idea was great and could definitely have grown into a viable business given time. Looks like the VCs didn't want to wait for that to happen and now they have to do all this social network bullshit.

scottru• 16 years ago

I do a _lot_ of recruiting - either direct for clients (i.e. wearing a recruiter hat and filling their positions) or indirect for my consulting firm (i.e. people who will help us meet our client's needs). In doing so, I place a lot of ads on CL and personally read hundreds of resumes and notes each month. I read every CL mail myself. Before this, I spent 10+ years hiring at various BigCos and MedCos. So it's one person's opinion, but I do know what I'm talking about.

If you're applying for a position on CL (or, really, anywhere), it is _absolutely_ worth spending five minutes doing _something_ that shows that you've actually read something - the job description, the company's bio, their videos of their technology, something. I'm reading a lot of people arguing their way out of doing so below, and I'll tell you that I'm happy for your ability to argue but you will miss out on great things (and you can hardly ever know great things from a job description) by not spending five minutes. I don't care about a fancy or detailed cover letter, but if you just submit a generic sentence and a resume, you've done nothing to make an initial positive impression - which is why you're applying in the first place. This does not take a lot of work, it's just called being thoughtful.

You don't really know who's reading your submission - could be an HR person, could be the hiring mgr, could be the CEO - but every one of those people has a vested interest in finding somebody who gives a crap, and has limited time.

(And yes, the article is a waste of pixels.)

megablast2• 16 years ago

The problem with listening to advice from rectruiters, is every recruiter is different and has different advice. And what one is looking for, annoys the hell out of others. Some insist on mission statements, some hate them. And it was trendy to do a mission statement for a few years, and now it is not.

Some of them want only 2 pages, some of them want lots of details, with a capability matrix.

Some of them like personal touches like photos, some of them just want the meat and potatoes, and get annoyed at this crap.

Some of them get upset when you don't address them by name, some of them hide their name on the ad, and there is no way to get it.

Some of them like short cover letters, some of them want you to address every single point they bought up in the ad, sometimes stretching to 4 pages.

Some of them only want the last relevant jobs, some don't like seeing gaps anywhere, which leads them to suspect that you were in jail (WTF?).

This is why you can't take recruiters seriously, they constantly speak like they all agree, when they don't. They give out useless advice, that can actually disadvantage you if you deal with someone else.

loupgarou213• 16 years ago

I think this separation between what different recruiters want actually makes for an easy way for the applicant to filter out the companies whose culture doesn't fit their own. Make your cover letter and resume fit you, if it gets dropped because it isn't what the recruiter wants (too short, too long, etc.) then that company probably wouldn't have been a good fit anyway.

Hiring on Craigslist experiment with interesting results

Related Stories