

Hiring on Craigslist experiment with interesting results - sanych
http://karmabond.com/pages/hiring-on-craigslist-without-email-overload
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?
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justinph
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
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
If more companies did it, some unscrupulous users would abuse it by posting
fake listings and not returning the money.

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derefr
> 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.

~~~
megablast
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.

------
awa
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).

~~~
loupgarou21
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.

------
scottru
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.)

~~~
megablast
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.

~~~
loupgarou21
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.

------
semanticist
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.

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rpledge
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
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.

------
jemfinch
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.

~~~
harshpotatoes
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.

------
metra
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.

or

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

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

~~~
pyre
He did say _all the applicants_ , not just a handful of them.

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

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

------
earl
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.

~~~
dkarl
_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
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.

~~~
harshpotatoes
So the next question is... Does the cover letter even matter? Is the cover
letter the reason I got past HR in the first place? Or did they just shred my
letter, speed read my resume, and slap it up to you because I got enough buzz
words in the resume? Or more probably somewhere in between?

~~~
dkarl
I'll describe the situation as I believe it was at my company before we were
acquired by MegaCorp. HR was in charge of processing applications but had no
influence over which applications were considered. They enforced whatever
absolute requirements the hiring manager specified for a particular position,
but considering we have senior developers with no college coursework, much
less college degrees, I bet our hiring managers were wise enough to specify
very few absolute requirements. Our HR personnel knew nothing whatsoever about
software development skills and were not expected to.

However, HR did _process_ the applications, and the result of that was that a
manager with an open position would get a big stack of resumes on his desk
every few days. The key word here being "resumes," rather than "applications."
I never heard a manager say anything about reading cover letters, or saying
things like "so-and-so's cover letter says he's interested in <blah>." When we
met to discuss candidates, the only sources of information people mentioned
were resume, phone screen, and interview.

So what's the point of the cover letter, you ask? I guess it varies. In my
company, the cover letter was evidently only read (or more likely simply
discarded) by HR, who had no input in hiring decisions. In a smaller
organization, the hiring manager might see the entire application, including
the cover letter, which the manager would most likely ignore. In a larger
organization, ignorant HR folks might be making judgments about candidates'
suitability for the job, and in that case the cover letter might mean a great
deal, since the resume would be gibberish to them.

------
georgieporgie
> 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
> 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.

~~~
kenjackson
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?

~~~
georgieporgie
> 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

Okay, I _really_ don't understand this line of thinking at all. I would
genuinely like it if someone could possibly explain this.

As I said above, I'm a professional, you're a professional. I am offering to
you my talent and wisdom which will earn you more than it costs you. You are
offering to me money and (maybe) a pleasant working environment.

So we're entering into this on a level playing field. _Why_ am I expected to
do a bunch of research and write up a customized cover letter, other than to
satisfy your ego?

As far as I'm concerned, this is a courtship like any other. I say, "hey,
here's my resume, what do you think?" You say, "hey, I like it, here's what
we're like, what do you think?" and we go from there.

The whole, "we demand a cover letter that makes our nipples tingle," thing
strikes me as ineffectual middle-management HR B.S. which probably keeps a lot
of great people from ever getting interviewed.

~~~
kenjackson
Since you asked for me to explain it to you, I'll do so.

As someone who has hired many people I've learned that people with so little
interest as to spend five minutes looking us up are typically generally lazy
(even outside the context of our company) and specifically may be incompetent.

At the point of looking at resumes I have very little to go on. If the resume
comes in with Kool Aid stains on it, and states that you'd like any job that
pays, preferably working with hot chicks, I'm less inclined to spend much time
with your resume. Everyone says they're a professional. Unless I'm desperate
to hire someone, the burden of proof is on you. And the fact of the matter is
if I'm getting 500 resumes, and 50 of them can point to having reverse
engineered our object-model in high school, why does your resume asking "what
is it that you guys do again?" merit a second look.

Maybe in a world where you're especially in demand, what you suggest is fine.
If I get Sergey Brin or David Cutler's resume on my desk, I'll call them and
let them know what we do. But if you're random dev -- well you need to prove
you're not JUST a random dev.

And this really is relative. If you're applying for the most coveted dev role
in the world, you need to show more in the resume than if you're applying to
fix bugs in the Waste Management LOB app written in COBOL from 1979.

~~~
georgieporgie
I'm going to maintain that employers should look beyond a cover letter and see
if the applicant's past experience indicates that they're actually relevant to
the role.

> 50 of them can point to having reverse engineered our object-model in high
> school, why does your resume asking "what is it that you guys do again?"
> merit a second look.

That's an unfair comparison. One indicates, presumably, direct technical
experience with your product.

Between engineer A, who has X years of relevant experience and no cover
letter, versus engineer B who has Y years of irrelevant experience, but an
_awesome_ cover letter, who are you going to choose?

> But if you're random dev -- well you need to prove you're not JUST a random
> dev.

That's precisely what my _resume_ does. A flattering cover letter only serves
to demonstrate my B.S. skills.

Now, I'll admit that I can certainly write a cover letter which is
_technically relevant_. I will highlight my skills in particular areas named
by the job listing.

However, it's been my experience that HR looks for utter bullshit on the
resume, and manager types want to hear how awesome their company is. The funny
thing is, I haven't heard of _most_ tech companies, and _most_ tech companies
have pretty bland websites which are just marketing tools and don't tell me
anything relevant to working at a company as a software engineer.

I dunno, I'm wildly jaded by both sides. I openly admit that I have a bug up
my ass about H.R. because I've had too many problems with them on both sides:
trying to weed me out for B.S. reasons (e.g. "would you say computers are more
of a job, or a hobby?"), and preventing me from interviewing qualified
candidates, while sending me godawful douchebags who can't even write a for
loop.

------
zeynel1
"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
yeah, this is not cool IMHO.

