Cheezhead

Checkout the growth that Craigslist is currently experiencing when compared to the most established job sites:

Few things to consider here:

• The job board traffic is just job seeker driven. Craigslist offers everything from A to Z in regards to classifieds. So, this really isn’t apples to apples. Plus, Craigslist is opening up new cities at a maniacal pace, whereas the Big Three are relatively more established globally.

• That said, the Big Three and every newspaper in the country should be very afraid of Craig. They’ve built a cultural phenomenon with no advertising and near $0 pricing (for now). And now that eBay owns 25 percent of them, who knows what the future may hold in terms of awareness.

• In addition to the scary growth as seen above, Craigslist, in contrast to many of their competitors, offer two distinct advantages:

1. All of the jobs posted on Craiglist are spidered by Google and other search engines. Most other job boards  serve job postings dynamically, which are harder to index (usually impossible) for search engines.
2. All of the jobs on Craigslist are available as an RSS feed, so they can be served to users opting in for postings very quickly and without e-mail’s spam filters.

To me - and what I tell my HRSEO clients -  job sites should primarily be used by employers to serve the greater good of getting job seekers to an employers own site and jobs and into their own database. Of the most popular options - and especially for the investment dollar ($0 everywhere but San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York) - Craigslist does a good job of achieving this goal.