Craigslist: Can You Actually Find a Job?

These days, Craigslist is fill with more crap than good. Sure, the site might work well for selling those old baseball cards or finding a new apartment, but the jobs usually leave something to be desired, especially for freelancers. Yes, there are tons of telecommute jobs listed every day…but half of the people who list writing and other online jobs aren’t willing to pay, and the other half are largely made up of people who never reply, don’t know what they want, are extremely picky about every detail, or forward your email to some kind of spammy email list where you get offers to pay for a database of open jobs. Yeah. No, thank you.

Image: sxc.hu

But there is glimmering holy grail when it comes to CL postings. Every so often, if you shift through the piles of sludge, you’ll find a great opportunity that pays well. I’m happy to say that I’ve found jobs on the site, and some of them have been extremely lucrative. So how do you spot a CL ad that has potential?

• Look for a job that has a payment amount listed. “Negotiable upon experience” is usually a bad sign, and TBD or “experience” is never good. Usually, those places say that they want you to work for free for a few weeks and then they’ll consider a pay raise. Just say no.
• Its a good sign is there’s a contact person listed or a website for a reference point. There are, of course, legit jobs where the poster just uses the CL-provided email address, but its much more common that jobs with real promise have more transparent contact information.
• They give clear directions. Being vague isn’t good.
• They don’t make promises about how much you could make weekly or monthly. Real jobs have real money connected, not “potential.”
• It hasn’t been posted multiple times over the past few months. A re-posting once might be ok, since it may mean that they just didn’t find a good candidate the first time around, but posting multiple times over a short period usually indicates some kind of scam.

Overall, be careful and just use judgment. Don’t waste your time on posts that seem a bit “off.” Many of the blogs that compile job ads every day filter out the “bad” ads, so that’s a great place to start until you learn how a good ad should look.

Have you ever gotten a job from CL? Have you ever been scammed or come applied for a job that ended up to be terrible?