Hiring on Craigslist is a Nightmare

It’s no secret. Hiring on Craigslist can be a nightmare.

You spend an hour or two creating a job description using specific keywords and language in hopes of attracting the right candidates for the job. You spend some more time getting the details neatly formatted, take one more look for final edits,  then (finally) submit your job ad.

You wake up the next morning, get a cup of coffee and sit down at the kitchen table, ready to check a few emails before heading to the office. As you pull up your inbox, you almost spit out your coffee!

57 resumes are waiting in your inbox.

After the daily commute, you settle in to your office. Again, you open your inbox. Suddenly, the number of resumes has now climbed to 85, all in the matter of an hour or so.

You start to feel a bit overwhelmed. Determined to make way through this daunting stack of resumes, you reluctantly open the first resume at the top of the list.

And this is what you find:

Does this look familiar? Photo via FunnyorDie.com

Obviously this is a gross exaggeration but it makes a solid point.

You spend the majority of your time filtering out applicants who are completely unqualified in the first place. The endless stack of resumes consuming your inbox is plagued with candidates who either have no relevant experience, unrealistic salary expectations, or simply those who use a “shotgun approach” and blast out resumes to any company that is hiring at the moment.

You’ve made a valiant effort so far, but your’e running out of time because you need to choose at least 5 applicants for a phone interview by the end of the day.  So after only getting through half of the resumes, you decide to cut your losses and wind up choosing only from the resumes you were able to scan through.

The result of all your hard work?

You rarely end up with the best candidate for the job.

This unfortunate result is not because all applicants are unqualified. Most likely, it’s because a candidate you “should have” hired was either lost, languishing at the bottom of the stack, or their resume was glossed over due to mental fatigue.

So how can you prevent this?

At Ovation, when it comes to screening resumes, we believe in the 80/20 Principle. You should spend 80 percent of your time focusing on the best 20 percent of applicants. With the 80/20 Principle, your company will arrive at the best possible hiring decision,

Ovation’s dynamic hiring tool puts you in charge! Ovation makes the 80/20 Principle possible by automatically vetting and ranking each incoming application, based on your custom criteria.

Resumes are no longer crammed in your inbox based on “first come, first serve”. Instead, they are neatly organized and placed in order by “best-fit,” so top candidates (those that deserve to be noticed) rise to the top.

Finally… Hiring on Craigslist doesn’t seem like much of a nightmare anymore.