Would you take your business to a place where you’d have to work alongside a garage sale, a pyramid scheme, a kid who modifies Xboxes, a speed dating table and a lot of profanity?

The prospect might seem crazy, but every day thousands upon thousands of employers and would-be employees do just that. The place where they lay it all on the line is Craigslist.org. Craigslist is best described as a collection of online classified ads. It is simple, free (for the most part), expansive and almost completely unregulated. With the ability to reach so many people and search for so many services and products, Craigslist might seem like a no-brainer for your office.

The mega-site has a jobs listing section that absolutely dwarfs the likes of Monster.com or CareerBuilder. However, with a community that is controversially nefarious at times, it would be understandable to not want to job hunt or search for talent on Craigslist. You can find out plenty about the popular online community and uncanny founder Craig Newmark, but we are here to tell you that this site can and does work as a professional resource. Like all other things online, you just need to present yourself professionally and know what to look for.

To give you an idea of how functional or dysfunctional Craigslist can be, we posted an anonymous job posting as well as tried to ask for employment as an inexperienced individual to see how honest the web would be to us.

Posting a Job

Let’s start with the good news. Any job posting, regardless of how vague it is, will generate a fair amount of response. This might be due, in part, to the sheer number of users on Craigslist. Still, most of the replies to our job posting seemed genuine. Our description was pretty much a catchall for anyone who might work at a web firm. So, to be fair, we won’t critique our applicants. Let’s just say that the majority of them were off-point for the general job they applied for, although about a third could fit the bill at first glance. We did pick up a few scams and clearly phony resumes, but not enough to consider the endeavor frustrating.

As a side note, we should say that posting a fully descriptive job ad that discloses your company name and information will yield more applicants and, thus, more qualified applicants. We know this because we’ve done it.

Applying for a job

Now, for the ugly stuff – there are clearly individuals on Craigslist who are out to make a buck. Our attempt to find a position didn’t go nearly as well. Looking for a position by searching the listings can be tiresome. There are just so many listed as work-from-home scams, buy an online business posts, blog for free listings and general illegitimate junk that it’s easy to become discouraged. With that considered, it makes our good applicants from the first posting seem a lot more determined.

The worse part about the job hunt is attempting to post your own availability for a position. We tried it out. Our fictional job hunter, Brandi, was planning to go to art school and was looking for an entry-level position or internship anywhere in the creative field. Her experience, as listed, was barely there. She was bubbly, a poor speller and previously worked in fashion.

Brandi was bombarded with scams – online marketeering stuff where you pay to work (read: pyramid scam) and pay-per-click blog spamming were popular offers. Telemarketing was another common pitch. While not completely shady, it was in no way a response to her actual post.
Then the offers for dates flooded in. And she did get a few. Remember how we mentioned all of the “other” stuff on Craigslist? Well, singles ads are certainly one of them. It became clear to us that some of these people troll around the jobs wanted section as well.

Craigslist can be very R-rated. While we don’t encourage you to browse for this type of content, it is not hard to find. Luckily, most of Brandi’s would-be suitors were fairly polite and kept their inquiries very general. Still, she was posting for an internship, not a boyfriend.

At the end of the experiment, Brandi did get two or three offers that seemed encouraging and educational. The rest was unfiltered hogwash or offers for long walks on the beach. Gross.
There really doesn’t seem to be a good answer for using Craigslist to get a job or as an employee-finding tool. It definitely seems like ambiguity brings out the creeps and weirdos.  Just like many online interactions we’ve written about, legitimizing yourself and being upfront about who you are and your purpose for the interaction will help you avoid spam, trolls, creeps and scams.