Craigslist started out back in 1995 as an email newsletter and has grown into the largest online classifieds website today. It features a large variety of listings, including houses for rent, consumer services, upcoming events, items for sale, and job openings – attracting a whopping 50 billion page views per month. Such a massive volume of traffic has led to its immense success as a destination job site as well, especially for blue collar jobs. In fact, almost three decades since its inception, it is still among the top 10 job sites today.

One of the top reasons for the site’s phenomenal success is its ability to attract both active and passive job seekers, and as a consequence, deliver highly relevant job applicants. With Craigslist, even if your cost per click (CPC) and cost per applicant (CPA) are high, your cost per hire (CPH) is often among the lowest across all job sites – something we’ve explored in an earlier blog post.

In 2020, due to the pandemic-driven disruptions in the labor market, Craigslist’s performance as a job site was adversely impacted, as was the performance of all other job sites in the US. However, in 2021, following a period of strong economic recovery and a resurgence in the number of job openings in the market, Craigslist has bounced back as one of the most attractive talent sources for certain types of jobs.

For example, consider delivery driver jobs – a fairly popular job category over the past year or so, and a linchpin of the gig economy. Our data on millions of jobs powered by the Joveo platform every day, indicates that, based on recent performance, including Craigslist as a part of your media mix for hiring delivery drivers is a great idea.

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At a glance, this category has seen impressive improvements in clickthrough rate (CTR), click to apply (CTA), and CPA rates in just a few months this year, compared to its performance in all of 2019–2020.

Delivery Driver Jobs on Craigslist: Key Recruitment Advertising Metrics (2019–2020 vs H1 2021)

While evaluating these metrics, it’s important to keep in mind that employers pay a fixed amount for each posting on Craigslist (usually around $30 for a duration of 30 days). Here, there is no concept of a ‘bid’. So the average CPC value is shaped only by the number of clicks each posting receives. In effect, a higher CPC value indicates fewer candidates clicked on the posting, while a lower CPC value indicates the posting received a higher number of clicks.

The following are the key findings of our analysis:

  • Candidates are almost 3 times more likely to click on a job posting once they see it, and 72% more likely to convert and complete an application once they click on a posting. Fewer candidates have been clicking on postings (since the average CPC rose by 10%), but the ones who did converted at a better rate on viewing the posting and were also more likely to convert to applications – which is reflective of a far higher intent in applying to jobs than over the previous two years.
  • The gig economy is booming. The accelerated intent in applying for jobs is largely driven by a growing interest in gig jobs. Delivery driving gigs are at an all-time high due to the pandemic, which triggered a rise in online demand – and offline fulfilment – across industries.
  • The average CPA has significantly improved. Driven by a confluence of the above dynamics, the average CPA on Craigslist for delivery driver jobs declined by 36% this year (from $38.2 in 2019–2020 just $24.3 this year).

While a large majority of employers are struggling to find candidates today – despite record levels of job openings and unemployed job seekers – Craigslist remains undeterred (for certain job categories) when it comes to delivering relevant candidates at scale, and within the least time.

Looking to use Craigslist to hire delivery drivers quickly and cost-effectively? Keep an eye on this space for more as we share some of the best practices for doing so, backed by data.

To unlock the power of Craigslist and automate bulk postings on the platform using Joveo’s programmatic job advertising technology, reach out to us today!