LinkUp is a job-search engine that connects candidates with legitimate jobs sourced exclusively from employers’ web sites. Craigslist’s Jobs section is a series of regional job boards. LinkUp and Craigslist approach the same problem — connecting employers with candidates — very differently.
For Job-seekers, Craigslist has its place
If you’re a job-seeker, particularly one interested in part-time or contract work in your local area, Craigslist is a better solution than almost any other forum. If you’re a professional seeking career advancement in a salaried, full-time job, Craigslist’s lack of standards, lack of control over posters, and recent incidents with scammers, porn, and even violent criminals may give you pause. Despite its good intentions, Craigslist remains a caveat-emptor job-search option.
Employers should think twice before posting to Craigslist
As a hiring manager, HR representative, or in-house recruiter, Craigslist offers an inexpensive way to attract a lot of candidates quickly. It’s not free in most US markets anymore — Craigslist charges $25 for a 30-day posting almost everywhere except the San Francisco Bay Area, where it charges $75 — but it’s often the first site companies visit when they want to fill their pipeline with job-seekers.
Posting jobs on Craigslist can cost you much more than cash. Here’s why:
- Craigslist can generate an avalanche of generic applications from often-undiscerning job-seekers. Do you have the time to sift through them?
LinkUp’s advantage: Job-seekers go straight to your site, where they complete your custom application and get integrated into your applicant-tracking system (ATS). LinkUp even lets you track click-throughs, completed applications, interviews, and hires — so you can fully measure the effectiveness of your recruitment advertising. - Craigslist’s popularity translates into impulsive applicants. Candidates rush to fire off their resumes, seldom visiting your site to educate themselves about your market, products and services, culture, and values. Do you want to spend your time telling candidates about your company when they can’t even remember why they applied?
LinkUp’s advantage: Job-seekers go directly to your site, so you gain full control over their experience. You can track all the metrics of their visit, so you’ll have a good idea before you even pick up the phone whether the candidate was doing their research or just a ‘drive-by.’ - Craigslist accepts job listings from recruiters, often resulting in multiple postings for the same opportunity (what candidates fittingly call “dupes”). Do you want to deal with agencies feuding with your firm over which one got you a given candidate’s resume first, or fuel the ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of candidates’ cost?
LinkUp’s advantage: Postings from recruiters, job boards, or aggregators aren’t allowed on LinkUp, so candidates will never be exposed to duplicate postings or, just as bad, to jobs that are dead, frozen, or filled. - Craigslist seldom attempts to control job posters who run bait-and-switch shops, where candidates are asked to interview but quickly find themselves being sold an “opportunity” or costly service. Scams are part of life on Craigslist. Is that the context in which you want to advertise your company’s jobs?
LinkUp’s advantage: All LinkUp’s jobs come directly from the web sites of established employers. Recruiters and private parties can’t participate at any price. Result: no scammers, porn, or predators. - Craigslist has a resume bank that’s free to search — which is egalitarian — but (because it lacks structure) will likely just waste your time. It also has an unfortunate history of leading to unwelcome solicitations.
LinkUp’s advantage: job-seekers stay safe. They never store personal information on LinkUp, including their resumes. In fact, they can’t even log in without an OpenID account (the same ones they use to access Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, and WordPress).
To its credit, Craigslist carries no advertising, doesn’t syndicate its job listings to aggregators, deletes postings (both job ads and resumes) after 30 days instead of recycling them interminably, makes no promises about its site’s security, and warns all users not to trust anything that seems too good to be true. It’s arguably the most transparent player among the traditional, ‘pay-to-post’ job boards.
LinkUp’s other advantages
Besides posting only jobs from legitimate sources, being more secure, delivering applicants directly to companies’ web sites (which yields better-informed, more focused candidates), and letting companies track key recruiting-related metrics, LinkUp also has the following advantages over Craigslist:
- LinkUp’s jobs listings stay fresh, without any effort on companies’ part. Although it’s possible for Craigslist posters to edit or delete their job listings as circumstances dictate, they rarely do. Candidates thus can’t be sure the job they’re reading about is still open, much less accurately described. By contrast, LinkUp validates its 400,000 listings automatically, from the source, each night.
- LinkUp can syndicate to Facebook and Twitter. LinkUp will, at your option, tweet all your jobs as well as configure your “Current-Jobs-At-Our-Company” Facebook app (which puts a Jobs tab on your company’s fan page and ties directly into your ATS). LinkUp lets companies’ meet their social-network job-distribution challenges. By contrast, Craigslist has no social-media distribution channels.
- LinkUp gives access via its iPhone app, Facebook app, blog widget, email agents, and custom RSS feeds. LinkUp gives candidates many more options for finding and applying to employers’ jobs. By contrast, Craigslist just offers RSS feeds and a Google gadget.
- LinkUp alone offers companies their own branded Career Portal — essentially a full-function ATS — to help post, manage, and expose jobs directly from their web site. With this tool, companies can manage all aspects of candidate interaction, track sources, and report on historical and current recruiting efforts. Don’t guess whether you’re improving your company’s recruitment ROI.
- LinkUp offers true pay-for-performance recruiting. For companies with urgent needs and/or challenging positions to fill, LinkUp’s pay-for-performance recruitment ad model provides full accountability. Simply define a daily or monthly budget, parameter preferences (geography, for example), and the jobs’ relevant keywords. Then, otherwise-relevant jobs will appear in one of the top two positions of the search results page, with a yellow background. Companies pay a small fee for each candidate who clicks through to the selected job(s)’ description. And of course they retain complete control of all variables, especially their budget.The pay-per-click (PPC) model delivers vastly better flexibility and ROI relative to Craigslist’s traditional ‘pay-to-post’ system. LinkUp’s model has the added advantage of costing much cheaper than Google, Indeed, and Simply Hired. Also, because LinkUp doesn’t carry these companies’ ads, employers won’t have to bid against them. In other words, LinkUp lets you recruit on your terms.With Craigslist, by contrast, companies are stuck — they pay even if their job ad generates no candidates at all. And if companies make their job sound too enticing, they get flooded with uninformed applicants.
Fine, but what about the price?
Craigslist looks cheap. And for companies listing 1 or 2 openings (particularly contractor positions) at a time, it can be an efficient way to fill their pipeline with candidates. But its pricetag is hardly a true indicator of its real cost, as explained in the following examples
Example 1: Your company needs to fill 7 or more positions in the San Francisco Bay Area. Craigslist’s up-front cost: $525. LinkUp’s: $499. Using LinkUp costs you less than posting on Craigslist, even if you just do so for one month. And LinkUp offers discounts for a 3-month commitment, so it costs the same up-front as if you’d posted only 6 positions on Cragislist.
But those are just the up-front costs. As Example 2 explains, LinkUp streamlines the recruiting process so dramatically that your goal — actually filling these positions — costs much less than with Craigslist.
Example 2. Your company needs to fill 4 positions outside the SF Bay Area. Craigslist’s up-front cost: $100/month. LinkUp’s: $499. If you spend 5 hours per position per month integrating candidates with your ATS, qualifying and educating them, and generally doing things you wouldn’t need to if you’d used LinkUp, and your time is worth even $30/hr, you’ve just spent another $600. Unless you’re lucky, the best candidates will have taken other jobs by the time you recognize their value, so that $600 has been wasted. Savings with LinkUp: $201.
Example 3. Your company needs to fill 3 positions outside the SF Bay Area. Craigslist’s up-front cost: $75. LinkUp’s: $499. Let’s say you have a great ATS and your Craigslist ad convinced your candidates to apply directly from your site, so now you’re tracking and communicating with them efficiently.
Can LinkUp still compete? Indeed it can. The national pool of candidates LinkUp can reach dwarfs that reached by Craigslist’s local market (the only place your job appears). Craigslist has no social-media distribution channels, no iPhone app, no Facebook app, no Twitter channel, and no email alerts. It’s a fact that today’s job-seeker is much more likely to be active in a social network such as Twitter than to be trawling Craigslist itself. She or he will probably find out about your company’s opportunities by participating in such networks, or through friends and colleagues who do, than from a single, regional job site. Can you confidently turn your back on those channels? Don’t you want the best talent, not just the ones from the cheapest source?
