During our startup phase, our
hiring came from networking. But after a while, not only does the internal network get exhausted but sometimes the recommendations can even cause conflicts when the recommended people don't interview well. (Unfortunately, a small company like ours does not have a HR department so we interview and review by committee.)
Hence, the last few years, our candidate pool has come off
Craigslist. If you don't know about Craigslist, it is a barebones "newspaper ad" site (but without the news) that dominates the major urban markets in the U.S. Ads posted are free except for job ads and housing ads in New York City. By running a text-only site, they keep their bandwidth to a minimum where submitted free ad volume brings in the eyeballs for the paid ads. In the San Francisco area, we usually get 50+ replies for technical positions and 200+ for office/admin/customer service positions. At a cost of $100 per ad, it's a nice deal for employers.
Unfortunately, receiving so many resumes is a huge hassle to manage. Without some way of organizing the applicants, it is very easy to forget who you've reviewed already and what everybody's verdict was. So after the first few job posting rounds, we developed a simple resume database. We give every applicant a score of 0-5 in 5 different areas:
- Cover Letter
- Experience
- Education
- Location
- Extras
After a few days when the job replies stop coming in, we set an arbitrary cutoff for who gets a phone interview. The goal is to do about 10 phone interviews per job posting to winnow down to 3 in-person interviews. Sometimes it does take 2 or 3 postings per position where we tweak the job description based on the job replies.
For a small company like ours, we've had decent success hiring off Craigslist. On the average, we've spent about $200 (2 ad postings) and devoted 10-15 hours for interview time per position.
(Filed in hiring)
In the past 4 years, we've done most of our new hires using Craigslist. The position we've hired the most for is Data Control Analyst and each time as the economy worsened, the response rate went up. Here's how each... Read More
Hiring off Craigslist
Posted by Mossy
September 10, 2009 4:38 AM
Hence, the last few years, our candidate pool has come off Craigslist. If you don't know about Craigslist, it is a barebones "newspaper ad" site (but without the news) that dominates the major urban markets in the U.S. Ads posted are free except for job ads and housing ads in New York City. By running a text-only site, they keep their bandwidth to a minimum where submitted free ad volume brings in the eyeballs for the paid ads. In the San Francisco area, we usually get 50+ replies for technical positions and 200+ for office/admin/customer service positions. At a cost of $100 per ad, it's a nice deal for employers.
Unfortunately, receiving so many resumes is a huge hassle to manage. Without some way of organizing the applicants, it is very easy to forget who you've reviewed already and what everybody's verdict was. So after the first few job posting rounds, we developed a simple resume database. We give every applicant a score of 0-5 in 5 different areas:
After a few days when the job replies stop coming in, we set an arbitrary cutoff for who gets a phone interview. The goal is to do about 10 phone interviews per job posting to winnow down to 3 in-person interviews. Sometimes it does take 2 or 3 postings per position where we tweak the job description based on the job replies.
For a small company like ours, we've had decent success hiring off Craigslist. On the average, we've spent about $200 (2 ad postings) and devoted 10-15 hours for interview time per position.
(Filed in hiring)
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In the past 4 years, we've done most of our new hires using Craigslist. The position we've hired the most for is Data Control Analyst and each time as the economy worsened, the response rate went up. Here's how each... Read More
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