Whither art thou, Craigslist?
Y’all may be interested to know that Craigslist is going to start charging for job postings in DC, Seattle, San Diego, and Boston starting October 22.
It’ll probably do quite a bit to improve the quality of the postings at Craigslist, which is great for the literally 2% of DC residents who are unemployed, but it’s going to be wildly annoying for recruiters employed by international companies who only have accounts on useless national boards like Monster and Hotjobs, who will suddenly have to fill out an expense report every time they want to use Craigslist. *cough* Not that I have an opinion about this, or anything.
(No, really, I think this is a move that makes a lot of sense for Craigslist. It inconveniences me personally, but Craigslist isn’t really for ME, after all.)
About damn time!
Craigslist used to be the best place to find geeky edgy folks or jobs for a geeky edge guy. Now its over-run with multiple listings of crap – each repeated daily, no hourly, to stay on the top of the site. Charge even a pittance and some of that swill will dissapate.
Now if they could only do the same for apartment listings.
Just as a note, Craigslist’s only source of income is pay-per-ads in San Fran, New York, and LA. I guess they have decided these other cities large enough to warrant a paid service…
Craigslist was a good place to find geeky, cutting-edge type people simply because it was a site known mostly to people who spend all their time on the Internet back before that was mainstream. It was a niche site.
Craigslist’s niche-ness isn’t coming back just because of this. That said, the fee WILL prevent a lot of the crap postings from getting posted and re-posted. It will be more useful as an actual job board than it is right now.
But it will probably also prevent classically hilarious posts like the girl who wanted to hire a bunch of hot women to be Playboy bunnies for her boyfriend’s birthday party. That stuff was what made Craigslist so much fun, and I’ll miss it.