Craigslist has built a reputation as a great resource of free and low-cost classifieds online, especially among company recruiters operating with limited budgets.
But as the years pass, it has become clear that relying on Craigslist to fill local job openings may require more time and money than its reputation suggests. In fact, in many cases, using a traditional job board is a more cost and time-effective strategy than posting on Craigslist.
From the early days of the site, Craigslist has offered a very easy method for posting listings: you simply select a city, then a category, open an account and post your job. This ease of use was a breakthrough in the often complicated online recruiting space. Over time, virtually every online job board has created an equally easy posting method, typically relying on e-commerce to generate revenue from each job posting.
Free also was the clear differentiator between Craigslist and most other online job sites. As founder Craig Newmark liked to explain, his goal was to help boost communication between communities of visitors, not generate revenue.
Eventually Craigslist began charging for job listings in many markets, which Newmark explained as a great way to filter out fraudulent and frivolous job postings. Newmark added that keeping the posting fee low – $25 to $75 dollars per month depending on the city – allows Craigslist to retain its position as the low-cost provider compared to the major job boards, a position the site actively promotes.
Low pricing also helped Craigslist cement its relationship with the demographic that the site cultivated from its beginning: teens, students and singles who relied on the site to help them find cheap furniture, a used car, a new partner (for the night or forever) and an entry-level job.
Yet 14 years after the launch of Craigslist, the site is losing effectiveness as a recruitment source under the weight of its own success. Job seeker traffic has grown exponentially in most Craigslist cities through the years, and the current downturn has accelerated that traffic growth. At the same time, the number of job postings has fallen in many cities in parallel with the slowed economy.
The result, say recruiters, is that every Craigslist job posting is inundated with applies, and given the demographics of the typical Craigslist visitor, that influx of applies has created a backlog of work. Instead of receiving 30 applications for a position, among which one or two may be worthy of an interview, companies of all sizes report receiving hundreds of replies within 24 hours of each posting.
Yet the number of qualified candidates who apply remains the same or has fallen for many positions, recruiters say, which translates into multiple hours spent reviewing an overload of resumes searching for the needle in the haystack.
This issue is a familiar one to anyone who has posted a listing of any kind on Craigslist. Since all listings are posted in reverse chronological order, the newest listings get the most prominence. When a company posts an opening for a receptionist on a Tuesday at 10am, the window for responses to roll in starts at 10:01am, but typically ends later that day as other postings push the receptionist listing further and further down the queue.
While it’s true that search results pull in older listings, those results also show in reverse chronological order, so the receptionist job falls below new listings for receptionists each time another job in that category is posted.
The problem is exacerbated in markets where Craigslist charges for job postings. If a gas station posts a listing for a mechanic for $25, and none of the applicants in the first 24 hours is a good match, the likelihood that the station will receive a relevant application through the rest of the 30-day post is very small.
To refresh the flow of new applicants, the station must re-post the job for another $25 to have the listing jump back to the top of the list. In some cases, employers post jobs four and five times before attracting a qualified new hire. At $25 or more per post, Craigslist becomes an expensive option fast, not to mention time-consuming given the flood of unqualified applicants, say recruiters.
Another common issue raised by hiring specialists is Craigslist’s lack of customer service. Once a job is posted, returning to the site to make edits or remove the ad isn’t difficult, as long as you’ve saved your confirmation email. But if you require a live person to ask a question about any aspect of Craigslist’s posting process, you’re typically out of luck.
Craigslist communicates with its customers solely via email, and given the size of its databases compared to the very small size of its customer service team (of which Newmark himself is a member), few customers receive replies to their support requests.
To be sure, there are exceptions to this trend depending on the job being advertised. And employers in smaller cities say they tend to fare better than their colleagues in medium to large markets. But for evidence of the larger trend, look no further than comments posted each day on Craigslist’s own user forum. It’s an insightful way to view the challenges recruiters face with the site nationally. Some examples include:
“When I post a help-wanted ad, I get flooded with resumes from people who aren’t qualified and I have to post several times to find a qualified candidate. If I were paying to post, I wouldn’t post here anymore.” – a contractor.
“We’ve been trying to post job ads for several weeks now. The ads are accepted and appear in our account but never appear on the site. I can’t tell you the number of hours we’ve spent trying to re-post so the ads will appear. We’re now at our wit’s end and have sent several help requests but haven’t even received an acknowledgment.” – a non-profit agency
“To pay $25 a day to find someone (yes, per day because ads are lost after the first day due to volume) is too much. We can only pay a dishwasher minimum wage, so $175 a week to advertise is a lot.” -a restaurant
Alternatives to Craigslist abound for recruiters. Sites such as Oodle, Indeed and Simply Hired offer free listings to a national audience, and the big three job boards – Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs – also reach national audiences at fees that range by zip code.
But recruiters typically report the same issues with national general interest sites, including a burst of response immediately after postings go live – often less qualified geographically given the national nature of these sites – and then a fast decline over a few days.
Holding up more effectively are niche sites that target the job market by one or more narrow criteria, ranging from industry or function to geographic and demographic. For instance, job boards offered by trade magazine web sites and associations tend to deliver a narrow, targeted response of applicants to job listings aimed at that audience.
In these cases, the niche sites typically charge posting fees ranging from $25 for seven days to more than $500 for 30 days, but the return on investment is good since recruiters tend to receive higher-quality applicants to review. Recruiters seeking a paralegal in San Francisco that post the position on LawJobs.com, for example, will tap into the niche of a site targeted to the legal profession, as well as into the local online publication audience for the San Francisco Observer.
Recruiters also report that newspaper and television career sites with a high penetration of visitors in a local market remain a strong source of qualified applicants who live in that market. Most local newspapers maintain an online audience penetration of more than 40% in their markets – and often higher – despite recent drops in print circulation and viewership, reports the Newspaper Association of America and National Association of Broadcasters.
The bottom line is that when recruiters consider online resources for attracting job candidates, the result often mirrors the quality of the source. As the adage goes: you get what you pay for, both in terms of quality and the time required to identify those qualified applicants.
Popularity: unranked [?]
April 13th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Tony is absolutely on target with his analysis. Despite his logic, however, companies, year after year, attribute an extraordinary anmount of their hires to Craigslist. Maybe its as simple as the the candidate and the employer recognizing a hire when it comes from crsigslist while so many aggregator and niche sites are are hard to pin down and link…in the end directly to the hire. I don’t know. I just know that companoies using Craigslist actually get large numbers of hires. Go figure.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Tony Lee’s post is both insightful and depressing. Why is it that so many employers will happily pay $1500, $3000 or more for a computer and resist paying $100 or $200 to find a high caliber employee to use that computer on-the-job? Just as bad, they then compound that nonsensical approach by writing a job posting only a brick could love. The job market may be flooded with applicants, but the best talent still have plenty of options. If an organization wants to recruit them, therefore, it must write an ad that will compel top performers to pay attention and post that ad where those top performers are most likely to see it. At a minimum, that means employers must invest as much time and effort in their advertising as they apparently do in griping about the lousy customer service at Craigslist.
April 13th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Don’t Adicio and Craiglist and/or other job boards compete? And to say that local online newspapers are great sources is pretty coincidental. Doesn’t Adicio power online newspaper classifieds?
Pretty self serving. Not sure if this is an ad or an article.
April 14th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Gerry, thanks for the feedback, but I believe there are two reasons the trend you mentioned has changed in recent months:
* you’re right that companies used to find hires year after year on Craigslist, but much less so this year based on the feedback I’ve received. Recruiters say the force of the recession and the much higher number of less-qualified, unemployed candidates responding to every job listing creates a severe “needle-in-a-haystack” problem with applications from Craigslist: quantity, but little quality.
* your work focuses on Fortune 500-type companies, where there still are enough resources to assign an intern to wade through a flood of Craigslist applications. But remember that 80%+ of all hires are made at companies with 100 employees or less, and that’s where the bulk of the complaints about Craigslist originate, as their user forum attests.
April 14th, 2009 at 10:51 am
I want to add that the impetus for my column was the negative feedback I’ve been hearing since late fall from companies attempting to recruit on Craigslist. While it’s true that @30% of Adicio-powered client sites are newspapers, @70% are niche sites targeting candidates by their functional or industry expertise, and they report continued success despite the downturn given the very targeted, qualified nature of the applicants they’re providing to their recruiting clients.
There’s no single “right way” to source qualified applicants. But the perception that free is best – or at least should be included any time a job needs to be filled – is the fallacy I’m addressing in this column.
April 14th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Yep, just more proof perhaps that recruitment is backwards, and the days of “Open Casting Calls” (job postings) are coming to an end.
Currently you post a job; applicants decide if they want to apply, and recruiters decide which applicants they want to interview.
A more efficient system would be one where perhaps recruiters could instantly identify who they wanted to interview, and candidates could decide if they wanted to attend.
The problem with this has always been in getting a sufficient number of applicants to make that model (matching) work – however in this market, attracting numbers of applicants is no longer an issue.
The real question for the future may be not “who will be left standing” at the end of this recruitment slump, but perhaps “what (model) will be left standing”.
April 14th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
There are Zero facts to back up this article written by a CraigsList competitor. This reads like a complete fluff piece based on what this guy probably heard from only a handful of people. I’m sure there are MANY more people who love Craigslist as a recruiting tool than those who feel it is a “poor recruiting tool”. Maybe the title should have been. Craigslist, a recruiting tool for the poor.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:25 am
This post is quite revealing.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Hmm, as someone about to post a job listing (or several), I appreciate this article! Sadly I had not even thought of listing on industry-specific sites… Thanks!
April 16th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
As a recruiter in the Seattle area who uses Craigslist, I would have to say that my experiences are totally contradictory to this article.
* Yes, we get a tidal wave of applications sometimes, but this wave will contain 10 to 20 times the number of qualified applicants in the first 24 hours than a month-long ad on the big three job boards.
* It takes only a few seconds to peruse the applications and see if the person is qualified (and if so, they get passed on to the hiring manager). Sure beats the weeks it can take to get one qualified applicant from Monster.
* I have never had to re-post an ad on Craigslist, as I always receive plentiful qualified applicants for my open positions.
* You don’t need to keep your confirmation emails from Craigslist. you just sign into your account and all your old ads are right there (although they have recently added a “search by date range” function).
* I have never had any technical problems with Craigslist.
I’m very curious which recruiters the author spoke to for this article, because it certainly wasn’t me or any of my colleagues. In fact, I just attended a recruiting forum the other day, and every one of the 25 people in the room agreed that Craigslist was the best source for finding new recruits.
April 16th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Timothy thanks so much for taking the poll of 25 recruiters in Seattle and letting us know that every single one thought craigslist was the best source for candidates. Ive been in the business for 5 years and know about 70 recruiters and cant find one that thinks craigslist is the “best source of candidiates”. But because of your poll, we plan to change the way to source candidates. Thanks so much. PS, when you say things like “every one” and “best source” we know you are either a complete moron or your name is Craig Newmark.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:14 am
I’ve used craigslist and the Dragon Exchange (www.TheDragonExchange.com).
I always get tons of spam from the craigslist postings.
The Dragon Exchange gives you not only a private inbox, but also the ability to block certain members from ever contacting you again.
And as a recruiter, job applications are automatically placed in a folder for you to review.
I get more replies from craigslist, but most are spam. I may get fewer replies from the Dragon Exchange, but in the end, they are easier to manage and better qualified.
Both options however are less expensive than the major job boards which are out of our price range.