How to Find Programming Job Leads on Craigslist

by Jason Swett,

Hunting vs. farming

There are two general strategies you can use to find programming job leads: hunting and farming.

“Hunting” can get results quickly but it only has a short-term benefit. Hunting includes things like scanning job boards and connecting with recruiters.

“Farming” methods can take longer to bear fruit (to continue the analogy) but the results are more permanent in nature. Farming can include things like building a technical blog, writing a book and giving technical talks.

In this post I’m going to talk about hunting, specifically using craigslist. But before that, let me describe a more general job board strategy.

Job board strategy

Geography and money

If you want to get a job that pays a lot, you should work for a company that has a lot of money. Companies that have a lot of money tend to be in big cities. So if you don’t live in a big city, your options are either to move to a big city or get a remote job working for a company in a big city. Either way, the geographic scope of your job search will be big cities.

The goal of a job ad response

When you respond to a job ad, your goal should not be to sell the employer on hiring you. Your goal should be to sell the employer on responding to you. The job of the first email is to get on the phone. The job of the phone call is to get an in-person interview. The job of the in-person interview is to get the offer. Don’t make the (extremely common) mistake of selling them on hiring you in the first email.

Volume

Most people apply to way too few jobs. You should apply to a lot of jobs. I recommend you shoot for a minimum of 5 per weekday or 25 per week. Also, don’t pin your hopes on any one particular job. And don’t let your foot off the gas just because you’re starting to get calls back. That’s the time to step on the gas more because what you want is as many concurrent conversations as possible, leading to as many concurrent job offers as possible, meaning you have more power and options at the time of the offer.

When to apply, when to wait

How do decide whether or not you’re qualified for a particular job? The answer is don’t worry about it. Just apply. I hate to invoke the “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” quote but it’s true. Applying to a job you’re not qualified for has very little potential downside but a huge potential upside. You should of course prioritize the jobs that look like better fits over the jobs that look like worse fits. But if you’ve given yourself a quota of 5 applications per day and you’re only at 3, fill the remaining 2 with jobs you’re not qualified for. Think about the worst that could happen vs. the best that could happen.

And what if you have no programming experience at all? What if you’re trying to get your first programming job? The same principle applies. Just fucking apply. They might ignore your application. So what? They might call you back for an interview, and you might go down in flames during that interview. So what? Now you have some interview practice. Do enough of those interviews and eventually somebody will neglect to ask you any technical questions and you’ll get the job. You can count on this. It probably won’t happen on your first, third or twentieth try, but if you try enough times, getting an offer is inevitable.

How to get job leads using craigslist

Historically, most of the job interviews I’ve gotten have been from job boards, and the job board I’ve used the most is craigslist.

Which craigslists to use

Earlier I said that it makes sense to geographically scope your job search to big cities. The best big cities for tech jobs are probably San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston, Austin and Portland, in roughly that order. Let’s call these “Tier 1” cities.

Then we can list all the “Tier 2” cities. We can even just pull up a List of United States Cities by population entry on Wikipedia. The ones we haven’t listed in Tier 1 include LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia…you get the idea of course. What you want to do is make a list of all these cities and put them in a file somewhere.

You can prioritize this list any way you like. For me, I live in West Michigan, so I prioritize Chicago and Detroit high on the list because they’re easy to get to. It really doesn’t matter a ton which cities are on the list and how you prioritize them. The point is that there should be a lot of them.

What to do once you’ve chosen your cities

For my list I do kind of a foreach loop. For each city on my list:

  1. Visit the craigslist for that city, e.g. https://sfbay.craigslist.org/
  2. Visit /sof and /web
  3. For both /sof and /web, search for my competencies (e.g. “rails”, “ruby”, “javascript”, “angular” – all separate searches)
  4. Start applying to stuff

How to respond

A deep discussion of how to respond to a job ad is outside the scope of this article but I’ll say this: Keep it short. Don’t write a commercial for yourself. Just invite the other person to have a conversation. Make it easy to respond.

In my mind, the fewer details I include about myself, the fewer excuses the recipient has to disqualify me. If I say I have 3 years of experience and the job ad says 5, then that’s a reason to disqualify me. But if I leave out my years of experience, then the recipient doesn’t know, and has to ask me in order to know. And by the time we get to that part of the conversation, the interviewer may no longer care about years of experience because my other strengths compensate. So my email responses are very short. I don’t even attach a resume unless specifically directed.

Be upfront about geography. If the job posting says “REMOTE WORKERS NEED NOT APPLY!” respect that and refrain from applying. If you’re willing to relocate, say so. If you want to work remotely but the ad seems to expect local applicants, address the matter.

By the way, just by following the instructions in the job ad, you’ll already be ahead of 90% of the applicants. I’ve been on the receiving end of job applications. It’s amazing how sloppy and careless so many people are.

Lastly, you might hear other people talking about how they’ve “tested” different email subject lines, etc. when responding to job board ads. That kind of claim is pure bullshit. There are way too many variables involved, and way too small of a sample size, to be able to test the effectiveness of various email tactics when responding to job ads. The best you can do is to gain an understanding of human psychology and apply what you’ve learned to your email tactics.

Persistence

I want to leave you with some advice regarding persistence. One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Ben Franklin, is “Energy and persistence conquer all things.” The shortened version I chant in my head is, “Persistence conquers all things.”

When you’re early on in your job search, it will all feel like a waste of time. You’ll apply to what feels like hundreds of jobs and hear nothing back. You’ll probably feel very discouraged. But then, all of a sudden, you’ll get a flood of activity. It always works that way.

And depending where you’re starting from, it will take shorter or longer to get to where you want to be. If you’re an experienced developer and you just want to relocate, it might take you as little as a few weeks to find a new job. (I’ve heard of job searches that began and concluded inside of one day.) If you’re just starting out, it might take you multiple years to get your first programming job. But however long it takes, don’t let any excuse allow you to cease your forward motion. Do something to move yourself forward every single day.

If you’re persistent and you keep moving no matter what, eventually something will work.

One thought on “How to Find Programming Job Leads on Craigslist

  1. Pardha

    HI,

    This is Pardha. Thanks for the great article. I would like to know how you build your resume and cover letter. Could you please send them for my reference.

    Regards,
    Pardha

    Reply

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