5 Tips for Making your Craigslist Resume Stand Out

While reviewing some of the recent articles on TechHui, I read a post from one of the members suggesting not to submit your resume to Craigslist.  They sited a few reasons, but most can be avoided with the following five tips.  Below is my response on TechHui:

Some of my best position were jobs where the company found my resume on Craigslist. In particular, CL SF. In the largest cities of Craigslist adoption (like SF and NY), posting anything will get shuffled to the second or third page by the end of the day. A perfect example is trying to sell a laptop in New York; you basically only get an hour or so before your ad is buried.

Despite your resume getting buried, companies do look and search for keywords simply because it’s free. When I’ve hired for positions, I know that CL is the first place I go. Here are a few tips that have worked for me:

1. Repost your resume daily. do it at a time of day that you think the potential employer would be looking (9:00 might put you at the top of the list on a search ran at 10:00 AM)

2. Post in HTML format. If you are HTML savvy, you can create a web version of your resume which will stand out in the crowd of dull black and white CL resumes. Especially if you are going for something in the online arena, its nice to have a resume that’s formatted similar to your .doc or .pdf version.

3. Change the background color! This is a bit of a hack and ties into #2 but is very useful. You can put your HTML in a table and set the background color and borders so your post looks like a document (I’ve set my background to a manila color to resemble resume paper.) Here’s some code you can play with:

<!–Table to add bg color to Craigslist posting–>

<table border=”5″ cellspacing=”0″ width=”100%” bgcolor=”#FFFFCC”>

<tr><td>

[add your HTML resume here]

</td></tr></table>

<!– End of CL bg color table–>

4. “Anonymize” that e-mail address. Use CL’s alias e-mail so all those Nigerian Scams don’t scrape your e-mail and spam you for the next 3 months. What better place to build an e-mail list than pulling @xxx.com addresses from CL’s resume section? These guys just build scripts to spam you. The latest technique is they send a one line message to your anonymous e-mail and try to get you to reply like “Are you in debt?” Be smart and just hit delete on these messages.

5. Add your LinkedIn profile badge. LinkedIn gives you several options to create a small and non-intrusive button that you can put in the bottom of your resume. It looks slick and gives the potential employer a quick link to your profile which hopefully only says great things about you

With any luck you’ve made yourself more visible on CL and less vulnerable to the spammers. I’ve attached a snapshot of what my resume looks like on CL (Honolulu) as an example.

I’ve just started contributing to TechHui and hope to get more involved.  I’m the moderator for the WordPress group and would like to get some dialog going between the WordPress users here in Hawaii.  There’s a TechHui meetup at Sweet Thai Basil in Manoa from 6:30 – 9:30 PM on Friday April 3rd.  I’m going to try to make it, hope to see you there!