Hiring on Craigslist without flooding your email inbox

My startup saved 40+ hours with a DIY recruiting tool. Learn how we did it.

Craigslist is an invaluable and underutilized resource for startups. We’ve posted several jobs there, ranging from part-time content writers to user study participants.

I’ve been consistently surprised by the quantity and immediacy of the responses, but daunted by the task of screening through them. Almost immediately after the posting is submitted, a flood of email applications comes streaming into your inbox — often in the hundreds and of highly varying quality.

The email flood

Reading through responses with varying formats and content is a very messy and haphazard process, and it’s difficult to collaborate with other people.

Traditional recruiting systems are overkill for this sort of task. They cost an arm and a leg, take many hours to set up and learn, and usually require talking to a salesperson. In our case (and like most people posting jobs on Craigslist), we just needed a simple way to organize candidate information and keep track of where they are in our screening and interview process.

In less time than we would have spent on the phone listening to a sales pitch, we made a DIY applicant tracking system using our own newly-released Airtable Forms feature that met our needs perfectly. For full disclosure, the hack involves our own product, but we spent a lot of time looking for alternatives and weren’t thrilled with the options.

Here’s how we did it.

We created a new empty Airtable Database, then added fields to collect specific information from our content writer applicants — in particular, their name, contact info, past writing examples, a resume, LinkedIn profile link, and also asked them to make some specific messaging suggestions for our product’s splash page.

Creating the Airtable

2. We then created a Form view on top of this database, and added an informative field description for each question.

Adding a public form to the Airtable

3. This form comes with its own direct link, which we pasted into our Craigslist posting.

We pasted the form’s link into our Craigslist post

Now, instead of emailing us, applicants simply fill out our form

4. As soon as the posting went live, responses began appearing in real-time.

Applications neatly appear in Airtable, complete with resume attachments and writing samples

5. We then added a dropdown field for us to mark the status of each application (reviewed, archived, needs followup, interview scheduled). This field would not be shown in the form view for job applicants.

We added new fields to manage the review and interview process

6. We also added an internal notes field and various other fields to keep track of our workflow, such as a checkbox field to indicate whether we had already sent promising applicants a trial project and our standard contractor agreement (via Zenefits, which will handle the collection of the individual’s necessary personal and payment information).

We could chat and collaborate in the context of each job applicant, making it easy to coordinate followups.

Chatting and collaborating

And that’s it! With our DIY system, we were able to save countless hours during the recruiting process and ensure that we didn’t miss out on any great candidates.

Here’s how to do it yourself

Click here to get your own copy of the Airtable database we used for this example.