In our first Craigslist blog post, we discussed some of the impediments to employers using Craigslist for recruiting, despite its successful reach. Here in Part 2, we will discuss how recruiters are adopting various advanced methods to overcome the obstacles and get the most out of it.
First, a few questions for anyone posting jobs to Craigslist:
- How many hours do users spend posting jobs on Craigslist?
- Have you ever found tracking impressions, clicks, applies, and hires challenging or impossible?
- Was it painful to post one template over and over in various locations and with multiple dates?
- How complicated is it to pin a location?
- How are your HTML skills?
The posting is complicated enough. Knowing HTML to succeed as a recruiter is a whole additional challenge. Most recruiters who post jobs are not living and breathing HTML. So for employers and recruiters posting to Craigslist and tackling the issues above, how do you make sure your job post still gets all of the love it needs to stand out and attract the best candidates? Is there a solution to these seemingly insurmountable challenges?
Yes! It’s about finding the right partner to help. Come along with me to find out how to get the most out of Craigslist, and what you must insist on from your partner for success.
- Automation of job postings: It takes about five minutes to post a single job on Craigslist. Eighty percent of the posting process is repeated for every job. If you had to post 1000 jobs, it would take over 80 hours — that’s two entire work weeks!The right approach: Templates. Using job posting templates, recruiters or marketers quickly cut down on repetitive work. With correct templates and a media plan, posters can schedule thousands of postings with varied locations and dates/months, saving hundreds of hours per recruiter.
- Access to real-time performance data to show results: Craigslist does not provide any insights into impressions, clicks, applies when a job is live.The right approach: Real-time tracking. By implementing a solution that can track real-time metrics, recruiters quickly get insights into spend and overall performance by tracking the entire job seeker journey from impressions to clicks to applies to hires.
- Oversight of post flagging or ghosting: Some Craigslist solution providers use a bot or do manual posting, but they do little or no quality check on the posts once live. Craigslist quality requirements are difficult to understand and unpredictable, with constant changes. It can often take a few days for the user community or Craigslist algorithms to catch problem posts, then remove them. By that time, many recruiters are no longer checking their postings and not even aware that they’ve been pulled.The right approach: Job post quality control. You need a solution that genuinely delivers very high predictability of success with quality control built-in — not the false promises of providers who don’t take this seriously.
- Control over your employer brand and candidate experience: Any posted job is enhanced with visually attractive content; it grabs a job seeker’s attention more effectively. But getting good looking content on Craigslist postings is difficult, requiring HTML knowledge. If the HTML tags are incorrect, the job post looks horrible, and the results will reflect it. It only leads to added manual time spent trying to ensure your posts look their best and properly represent your brand.Another issue with Craigslist job postings that can negatively impact the brand experience is pinpointing the location. A job pinned at the wrong location — easily done with Craigslist — can mislead the candidate and reflect poorly on your brand.The right approach: Built-in HTML editor and advanced mapping capabilities. Look out for a solution that has a built-in HTML editor, allowing those posting to enter text and more easily beautify the content. Find a partner with an advanced mapping solution integrated with Craigslist to help display your jobs at the exact store or location and not a few miles down the same road.
- Accurate job post previews: Sometimes when creating a job post, it looks fine. But when the job goes live, it looks completely different — and not in a good way! Users must be able to preview exactly how the job will look when posted.The right approach: Accurate job post preview capabilities. This way, no time is wasted — you know that what you create is what will be posted. And if there are changes, a recruiter can make them, preview how they will look and then post with confidence.
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A Real-World Example of Success
One of our customers in the transportation industry was experiencing high CPAs on Craigslist, and still didn’t receive enough applicants to meet their mission-critical hiring needs. When they shifted to using Joveo, we applied our data learnings gathered from our millions of job posts and hundreds of thousands of applications, to show them how to:
- identify the right places in Craigslist to post the jobs
- rotate jobs frequently
- use mapping features to navigate job seekers o the accurate hiring location
- post in optimal time windows to hit the most relevant user traffic
As a result of our programmatic optimizations, the customer reduced CPA by more than 50%. Time-to-hire (TTH) reduced, as well as cost-per-hire (CPH), which fell by 30%. The customer reduced the total number of job postings needed because the positions filled so quickly.
At Joveo, we continue to use Craigslist because the results never cease to amaze our customers. It has the right audience for the right jobs. If you’d like to know more about Craigslist for employers and recruiters — or all programmatic job advertising — and how to effectively incorporate it into your media strategy, please request a demo or reach out to us at [email protected].
