Craigslist is great for listing that old couch that’s collecting dust in your garage, but when it comes to posting an open position it’s actually not that effective.
Craigslist is great for having a virtual garage sale or finding endless entertainment in hilarious missed connection ads. But when it comes to finding qualified candidates for your restaurant, Craigslist just isn’t the right place. The frustrations of using Craigslist to fill open jobs have been persistent and many, which is in part why Poached aimed to create a better hiring experience for the restaurant industry. So if you’re posting on Craigslist for your open positions, here are a few things to consider.
It’s hard to make your job stand out
There’s no hiding it, the hiring market for the restaurant industry is competitive. You need all the help you can get to receive enough qualified applicants to make a decent hire. This means adding company logos and creating enticing job summaries and descriptions — putting in a little extra so job hunters want to apply to your ad. Craigslist doesn’t really offer any bells and whistles. You can upload a logo and try to create an interesting job description, but the defaulted list view makes your job ad blend in with all the others — making it as interesting as if it were printed in the classified section of a newspaper.
Your post gets buried quickly
This might sound counter-intuitive, but part of what makes posting a job on Craigslist unsuccessful is that so many people post their open jobs on Craigslist. Your job ad will quickly get buried to the second or third page within a day. The only way to bring your job post back to the top of Craigslist is to purchase another posting — and that can get expensive. At Poached, we’ve thought about this and created the Job Boost feature which puts your ad back to the top of Poached and shares it with our Partner Network, giving your job more visibility — and you can use it as often as necessary without needing to repost your job.
On top of having your email bombarded with applicants you can’t keep track of, many are unqualified for positions that require more experience…
There is no Applicant Tracking System
Craigslist doesn’t offer an Applicant Tracking System, which means whatever applicants you do get go directly to your work email. This can make finding and hiring talent very difficult because you’re not offered a space specifically for organizing, rating, or tracking applications across one or more open positions. With Craigslist you have applicants coming in with all your other personal and work-related emails, so the people you want to set up an interview with get lost and you end up with a lot of junk in your email.
More unqualified candidates apply
On top of having your email bombarded with applicants you can’t keep track of, many are unqualified for positions that require more experience, like Chef, Sous Chef or management. Some of our customers have told us that they receive a lot of applicants when they use Craigslist, but hardly any have the qualifications they need. So when you use Craigslist you have to wade through email upon email of shitty applications, and then develop your own way to keep track of any that are actually fitting enough to interview. This makes the hiring process more difficult and time consuming than it needs to be.
Opening Email Attachments can be dangerous
In the virtual world that we live in, “stranger danger” not only applies to people in creepy vans offering you candy — it’s expanded to opening unknown files from strange emails. When you post a job on Craigslist, you’ll be opening resume attachments from unknown people. This heightens the possibility of viruses and scams that could steal your personal and sensitive information. To add a level of security to our users, Poached uploads all resume files into our own system. Then we scan an image of the resume and produce a PDF through our filters which is what you see when you view or download a resume from an Applicant Detail view in the Poached BackOffice. When using Poached you can be assured that resume files are free of any malicious code.
When you’re looking for qualified Food and Beverage workers for your open positions, you want to post your jobs on a site dedicated to helping you do that — not a one-size-fits-all online board. At Poached Jobs, we’re in the business to help your business thrive by connecting your open jobs with industry professionals.