This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
If you’re an employer looking to attract talent, your company’s reputation plays a big part in the process. It informs the way applicants view you. The same is true when you’re picking a job posting site. Reputation matters.
Craigslist and Glassdoor have built their reputations on some distinctly different principles over the years. We’ll take a look at each of the platforms, what they offer and how they stack up to others, including ZipRecruiter.
What is Craigslist?
It was logical, and bound to happen. There were even others before Craigslist who saw the potential in creating an online version of print classified ads. But Craigslist was simple, accessible and good at what it did.
However, Craigslist might have been too easy to use, or misuse. The site’s perceived inadequate moderation has drawn a lot of criticism over the years, though it’d be fair to say that most ads on Craigslist are legitimate.
So how’s Craigslist from a jobs perspective?
Craigslist’s jobs section is still one of the more frequented job boards around, though it has been long since edged out by current industry titans like ZipRecruiter and Indeed.
What employers tend to find attractive about Craigslist is its ease of use and low costs for posting jobs. You don’t need an account to submit a Craigslist job posting — but neither do scammers.
The site doesn’t allow free job listings in the U.S. There’s a flat fee to post jobs on the classifieds site. This fee ranges from $10 to $75, depending on the size of the metro area you post it to.
Because of how easy and affordable it is to post a job on Craigslist, the site is ideal for smaller employers with shoestring or fund-as-you-go hiring budgets.
If you post on Craigslist, you may need to take steps to prove the legitimacy of your organization and job openings to reassure scam-wary job seekers of your trustworthiness.
What’s to like?
Anyone can post a job to Craigslist affordably.
The site still has a large audience and strong brand awareness.
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Sites like ZipRecruiter and Indeed offer employer verification, key in building trust with job candidates.
Other top job boards include employer reviews, which also build trust.
Craigslist doesn’t have a resume database for recruiters and hiring managers to search.
No tools for screening or tracking candidates
What is Glassdoor?
Ever been shocked by the culture at a new job? If only you could have heard what it was like to work there from anonymous current and former employees.
Glassdoor gives job hunters insights into a company’s culture, compensation and more through applicant and employee reviews. Reviewers can opt to share their job title, their company outlook, CEO approval, benefits and other details.
It also gives employers a chance to reshape the narrative being spun about them through those anonymous reviews.
It can be an incredibly impactful tool in branding your company, evaluating employee feedback, bolstering your organization’s reputation and ultimately attracting strong hires.
While Glassdoor can be good for attracting attention, you can’t post jobs to its job board directly. You have to go through its sister site, Indeed, to post jobs to both sites.
Together, Glassdoor and Indeed combine to offer a large audience for your job ads. Though some employers may find it simpler and more cost-effective to use a job board that packages everything into one plan.
ZipRecruiter, for example, offers the best of Glassdoor and Indeed: employer branding and direct access to its job boards.
What’s to like?
Powerful tools for branding and awareness
Indeed integration provides access to a much larger audience
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The ability to post directly to a job board, as you’ll have to go through Indeed
No resume database for hiring managers to browse
No applicant tracking system
No candidate screening tools
The Best of Craigslist and Glassdoor, In One Place
There’s plenty to like about Craigslist’s ease of access and affordability, as well as Glassdoor’s audience and branding opportunities. But another platform offers the best of both worlds.
With ZipRecruiter, you gain access to a wide network of job boards and the job seekers who frequent them. It has partnered with over 100 other job boards, so you can syndicate your job posting to every corner of the internet.
It also offers branding solutions like Glassdoor. You can set up a company page to help job seekers get to know a little about your company culture and reassure them that they’ll be sharing sensitive information about their work history with a trustworthy company.
While Craigslist and Glassdoor lack their own resume databases, ZipRecruiter’s database hosts millions of active resumes that you can browse at your convenience to put together your shortlist of candidates.
Tracking and Screening
Easy to post and easy to apply often turns into easily overwhelmed with interest. ZipRecruiter empowers you to filter that flood of interest, using its tracking and screening solutions.
It gives you the option to add prompts to the application process, to eliminate candidates who fail to correctly answer your questions and advance those with acceptable responses.
You can even designate your questions as immaterial or deal-breakers.
ZipRecruiter supports integrations from dozens of the top applicant-tracking system solutions. So you can manage phone screens, interviews, your shortlists and more all in one place.
The AI Advantage
All these features are great on their own, but ZipRecruiter uses artificial intelligence to weave it all together into a well-rounded experience for people on both sides of the hiring process.
Their AI serves as a virtual recruiter for job seekers. It’ll alert them and nudge them to apply any time it finds an opportunity that fits their experience and qualifications.
For employers, ZipRecruiter’s AI makes it easier to scour the resume database for the most relevant candidates. It also works to elevate the visibility of your job ads and company pages to people more likely to be interested.
Frequently Asked Questions
Still not ready to sign up for a job site? Here’s a roundup of some of the most popular questions people keep searching Google and other search engines about Glassdoor and Craigslist.
Is Craigslist still good for jobs?
Yes, Craigslist is still a good place to post and find jobs. Tens of millions of people still visit the classifieds site every month, though many of them search Craigslist for things other than jobs.
However, workers who are more skilled may look to other jobs sites like LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter during their job search.
Can Glassdoor reviews be trusted?
Yes, but you should keep their reviews in perspective. Glassdoor can fully verify a reviewer’s time with an organization they purport to have been employed at.
Approach it with the understanding that some reviews might come from disgruntled job seekers and former employees, while many details shared on the site could only come from someone with intimate knowledge of the company they reviewed.
It can help inform a job search, but shouldn’t be the deciding factor.
Is Glassdoor really confidential?
The San Francisco Bay area company states that it doesn’t reveal the identity of those who post anonymous reviews on its site.
Are there sites like Glassdoor?
Yes, other sites allow reviews from employees, former employees and applicants about their experience with companies they’re interacted with. Other sites let people review an organization. For example, ZipRecruiter has employee reviews from Comparably integrated into its job board.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.