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Hey Team,

There’s no two ways around it. Staring at Craigslist ads all day trying to land a job sucks. Period. It’s not enough that it’s one of the ugliest sites on the entire webbernets either, it comes with a complete collector’s set of hurdles all expressly designed to make that nerve just behind your left eye start throbbing to the beat of heartbreak when all you really want is a paycheck. Here are a few things I tend to run into.





1. It’s Ugly.

We just went over this, but that’s no reason not to reiterate. After staring at pages and pages of blue and purple text sometimes I start crossing and uncrossing my eyes very slowly hoping that a Magic Eye picture of the Empire State Building surrounded by leaping dolphins will appear. (FYI: To date all that has appeared is a very painful headache.)







2. Location, Location, Location.

Craigslist is GREAT for some things. It’s always the first place I go whenever I need to buy something big that I’m happy to get used, but there’s a HUGE difference between Craigslist for San Francisco and Craigslist for Fresno, CA. This picture represents the sum total of open positions in Fresno for the “Art/Media/Design” category this Tuesday. I suppose this gripe is one part, “Why do I keep looking at Craigslist for jobs?” and one part, “Why do I still live in Fresno?”





3. No Pay.

I respect the heck out of internships. I did my time cutting matboard for other people’s projects and sweeping floors six hours a day, you’ve got to work your way into any industry however you can, right? The problem I’m seeing, and I totally don’t blame my BFF Craig for this one, is that lately there have been a lot of very complicated jobs out there listed as “internships.” It used to be that internship was just code for “free manual labor”…now it seems to be code for “I think our profit margins would be higher if we could find a way to do away with our entire labor budget.”





4. Scams.

If it’s necessary for me to click through this page every time I try to click on a category…something’s wrong. Period.









5. The Digital Drawbridge.

I’m not so young that I never got to experience dropping off my résumé at a place of business in a suit and tie. (I was in the suit and tie…not the business. Gotta love misplaced modifiers.) At least then you could chat up whoever happened to be (un)lucky enough to take your cover letter for you…and who knows, maybe you could earn a friend in the right spot by making a great first impression. Now, (and this is my least favorite part about job hunting) you could send a résumé through Craigslist to a hundred different companies and if you don’t have the right keywords in there for their search engines to latch onto then you’ll never even get a chance to hear an irritable secretary tell you that they’ll “keep your information on file” as she hands back your cover letter and you think to yourself, “Hey, waitaminute, you don’t even HAVE my information!”

Clearly these are not completely Craigslist’s fault. These are just some of the flaming hoops of unemployment 21 million Americans had to jump through in our brave new world last year. And yes, they suck. Sorry, gang…but I know we can get through this together.

Did I miss anything? What do you dislike about the job hunt? Head to the comments section and let me know!

I’m done.

Brett.