Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment • Hacker News Board

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#71

Post by Tangaroa » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 1:25 AM UTC

pyre wrote: post #35

wcchandler wrote: post #21

I attempted something similar during my last year of college. I made a posting at my closest large city, detailing my ideal job. I also laid out what seemed to be good requirements that I would have satisfied for the position. I was astounded by the results. I quickly had to remove the ad, too. The messages were heart wrenching to read. One man was unemployed after being discharged from the military. Another man had…

> My skillset was expendable and I needed to realize that. > I lost my sense of entitlement. I used to think my > $100,000 piece of paper meant something. > > Then I realized it did. I feel like this part is going over my head if the 'did' isn't a typo (meant "didn't).

College is an upper-middle-class luxury. Most job-seekers don't even have that piece of paper, so they'll have an even more difficult time finding work.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#72

Post by pawelwentpawel » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 1:52 AM UTC

stevejabs wrote: post #16

From personal experience, don't apply to any positions that don't reveal the company name in the post. You'll rarely get anywhere, and when you do it will likely not even pan out to being who you want to work for or the job that was described. What I normally do is this: Find a job that you find unique or intriguing. If it has a company name attached I immediately jump to LinkedIn to find who I may be working for and…

Imagine CEO's life if all of the 623 job seekers would apply this method.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#73

Post by iba » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:25 AM UTC

This experiment demonstrates the futility of job hunting cold-calling style. In my experience the best way to get noticed is through networking, especially through friends in the field. If I were hiring, I would give more consideration for someone who was recommended even by a friend of a friend. Our job hunting time is much better spent networking than spanning every craigslist job posting with our resumes. I wish someone does a counter experiment with networking vs craigslist spamming.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#74

Post by pawelwentpawel » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:30 AM UTC

After reading the post and admiring the creative pie-chart I started thinking about more time consuming experiment of a similar type. As I believe, most of the people that applied for this job weren't "snipers" but more of a bit desperate types machine gunning each single input appearing in their over-caffeinated visual cortices. If called back they probably wouldn't even remember the names of companies they applied for. I wonder what would happen if the fake job ad contained a fake website with a fake test (of some related domain or even a basic grammar/maths) for each applicant to solve before even uploading a resume. I guess that it would give us a more full picture not only on "quality" of competition but also on the number of machine guns in the field (ad views -> website views -> tests solved).

And a bit of an unrelated question - how illegal is posting fake job ads for such purposes?

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#75

Post by eru » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:31 AM UTC

RobotCaleb wrote: post #58

eru wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then I realized it did. What did it mean?

Something. He says it right there.

I had hoped for a more specific answer or elaboration.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#76

Post by keithnoizu » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:48 AM UTC

its kind of depressing to think of someone with a masters degree hoping to land a job that pays less than a fifth of what I make with an associates degree . . .

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#77

Post by wtracy » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:50 AM UTC

justjimmy wrote: post #25

I recently started looking for an iOS artist to work with and I posted a job ad on Craiglist and Kijiji, for the first time. I was overwhelmed with the response - I mean I knew there was alot of people using Craigslist but I had no idea of the scope. And the spam. I even had people submitting me their resumes who had nothing to do with what I was looking for. Needless to say, I was quite surprised by amount of respon…

Anyone else notice that on his second graph, the wedge labeled "34%" is significantly larger than the one labeled "39%"? I'm honestly wondering if he just got sloppy while drawing the lines, or if some numbers accidentally got swapped around.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#78

Post by wtracy » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:52 AM UTC

pawelwentpawel wrote: post #72

stevejabs wrote: post #16

From personal experience, don't apply to any positions that don't reveal the company name in the post. You'll rarely get anywhere, and when you do it will likely not even pan out to being who you want to work for or the job that was described. What I normally do is this: Find a job that you find unique or intriguing. If it has a company name attached I immediately jump to LinkedIn to find who I may be working for and…

Imagine CEO's life if all of the 623 job seekers would apply this method.

I highly doubt that there would still be 623 job seekers applying if this much work were involved.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#79

Post by mattgreenrocks » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 3:27 AM UTC

RyanIyengar wrote: post #22

Kaedon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the odds of submitting your resume and getting any sort of response are so low, perhaps the time would be better spent carving a niche for yourself - such as publishing articles like this blog entry.

Who will pay people to do that though?

Intrinsic motivation is an excellent signal for would-be hires, so it works well enough.

(not sure if sarcastic)

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#80

Post by l3amm » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 3:29 AM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #56

An interesting experiment (for a company that actually has a job and is not leading people on) would be to distinguish a job posting that says "Hiring for this position will be based in large part on a work-sample test during a half day at our office" versus "Previous experience . . . preferred, but will train the right candidate." We can tell that the United States economy is in recession (as is the case in many oth…

While I agree that work samples are definitely the way to go, I'm unsure how you could possibly engineer a work-sample that is time effective for 600 people. Clearly, the first pass of the screen cannot be the work sample alone or you will be administering dozens if not hundreds, since I doubt the threat of a worksample in a job ad would scare many people away (could very well be wrong about that.)

I think this is why HireArt (YC W12), exists. They pre-vet these candidates using a work sample for you, presumably they only administered and graded the work samples of those they found passed the 'resume bar.'

As for false positives, from talking to many employers the fear false positives is generally low because they figure they can "weed them out" during the interview stage. And while there may be statistical evidence showing a high false positive rate, it is surprisingly hard to convince hiring managers of this.