by Olha Romaniuk

Created on: April 15, 2009

Craiglist is a thriving online community that features online classified advertisements where anything from employment to a potential date can be found at the click of a mouse. This web site was started in 1995 by Craig Newmark in the San Francisco Bay area about local events and happenings. As the web site grew and expanded, it became incorporated as a private for-profit company in 1999, all the while continuing to develop and continuing to incorporate many additional cities in the United States. The site now serves over twenty billion page views per month and is a go-to engine for job seekers, apartment searchers, and potential daters.

Choosing to look for a job on Craigslit can be a convenient decision to a job seeker. After all, a person can view a list of potential job opportunities without ever getting up off a couch and leaving the house. Browsing by multiple categories can be very handy as well jobs that range from accounting and finance to writing and web design are all organized to be accessed at any time. A Craigslist browser can limit his or her search to a specific state or a city and then farther limit the resultant job listings by their specialization or by a key word search.

Of course, with an immense popularity of Craigslist, every job posting is inevitably exposed to thousands of potential applicants, who may all want to be hired for the same job. There is a lot of competition and a job applicant may not even realize that he or she is contesting against many other people. Sitting on one's couch and clicking on job postings and replying with vague, generic responses to each one of them will not, ultimately, get that response noticed. In an inbox filled with emails from dozens of applicants, only a few will get selected to be reviewed more thoroughly. At the end, only the ones that express a significant amount of interest will be found worthy of keeping and considering; the rest will promptly make their way into a trash bin.

To get noticed on Craigslist, an applicant needs to put in effort not only in his or her resume but also in an introductory email that is sent out as an initial inquiry to a potential employer. The email's subject needs to be specific to the job position that an applicant is expressing interest in and the body of the email should affirm that interest and elaborate more as to why this particular job opening caught an applicant's eye. It is not sufficient enough to send a brief, dry email that does not quickly recap the qualifications

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