| The much sadder reality is what actually happens in a company that posts that ad: 1) Optimistically post the job ad. 2) Receive hundreds of responses within hours of posting it. 3) Begin going through those hundreds of responses, reading cover letters and resumes. At first you're pumped then you realize very few people here are qualified for the position/read the post. 4) After ~20 resumes, you close your email for the day. If you made the mistake of using your personal email address, I'm sorry. 5) Despair. Pick and choose random emails (maybe filter by email, are there any harvard.edu's in there?) and immediately call the first person who seems remotely OK. Iterate step 5 until you find 'the one.' I've worked with/observed dozens of employers in this process, a tiny fraction of resumes actually get read, and frankly it's impossible to stay focused through the experience. A "fun" experiment is to print out 40 resumes in a pile, write a job description for those resumes and then try to find the most qualified one in that bunch. Free-text association with often poorly-articulated job requisitions is a nearly impossible proposition. Add in the step where you have to download and track those applicants, and it's damn near impossible to use Craigslist to find the best candidate. This was the original inspiration for our company, Foundry Hiring (www.foundryhiring.com). We're trying to build tools to make this process as painless as possible. In this instance we will give you a free link to post in your CL ad which has an application form in front of it, so that emails don't hit your inbox, the applicant's are stored directly in our database. We then give you tracking tools on top of it to make the process better. We're still in beta, but I would love user feedback. |