Craigslist as Recruiters’ Pet
|
Written By Reprise Media | March 23, 2005 | Share This
|
|
Forget Raymond, everybody loves Craig. Why? Because he’s got one of the most popular and tightly-knit community sites on the web. Since its start in 1995, Craigslist has remained refreshingly non-commercial and remarkably simple in design.
The low cost, high-exposure nature of its job board has long made Craigslist a favorite among recruiters, and now a […]
Forget Raymond, everybody loves Craig. Why? Because he’s got one of the most popular and tightly-knit community sites on the web. Since its start in 1995, Craigslist has remained refreshingly non-commercial and remarkably simple in design.
The low cost, high-exposure nature of its job board has long made Craigslist a favorite among recruiters, and now a very real competitor for the likes of Monster, Careerbuilder, and newspaper classifieds. SEOmoz has a post that talks about some recent improvements to Craigslist’s recruitment functionality.
As a recruiter during the roaring 90’s, I remember when Monster ads could be bought for relatively cheap. A series of steep price increases, and the resulting pressure from management to curb costs, caused my firm to seek out other venues for job postings.
At first this was difficult, since our HR department was dependent on the very rapid, high volume of candidates that Monster ads generated. Word of mouth and online research eventually led me to a number of free and/or low cost alternatives, including trade association sites, college job boards, alumni associations, developer and programmer forums, and anything with “just___jobs” in the title (i.e., job boards broken out by vertical).
When pooled together, the resume quantity still came in slightly under the number of Monster resumes, but the resulting improvement in quality more than made up for it. These candidates tended to be more actively engaged and selective in their job hunt than the Monster folks, who tended to go with a “blitz” tactic - sending their resume to dozen of employers with little regard for job suitability.
Am I talking about the long tail here? Maybe I am.
Speaking of long tail, Jason Calacanis has a new drinking game based on the phenomenon.
Topics: Advertising: Distribution, Craigslist, Search: Innovations |