For weeks I sent emails to companies advertising job openings on craigslist, with dismal results. I sent dozens of well-written, thoughtful emails hyping the skills and qualifications that would make me an ideal candidate for the specific job for which I was applying. And I didn’t hear word one back.
I’ll be honest - it was depressing. Applying for jobs can be very stressful because you’re making your first, and possibly only, impression in what can be a perilous medium. How formal should you be? Should you use a salutation? (I say no - you’ve already named the recipient in the To: field, leave it at that.) Does the email body act as a cover letter, or should you attach a cover letter separately? The process is not incredibly well defined, and on top of that, there are all kinds of easy mistakes you can make - forgetting to attach a file, copy and pasting some text from another application without changing some important text, and of course the everyday grammar and spelling mistakes.
I finally heard back from what I thought was the most unlikely job - one I had applied for not more than twenty minutes prior. More than that, the job hadn’t been posted for more than a couple hours.
After thinking about it, and reading that the ratio of job applicants to job openings is at an all-time high, I realized how important timing is. As someone who has posted jobs on craigslist before, I know how overwhelming the response can sometimes be. So the lesson I learned is, don’t even bother with jobs that have been posted for more than a couple days. This is especially true with unskilled or semiskilled labor jobs - their inbox is full, and they’re just going find a qualified candidate in the first ten or so applications and ignore the rest.
From then on, my goal was to jump on all jobs as soon as they were posted. Craigslist can make this really easy if you have an RSS reader that updates frequently - just go to the “Jobs” section in your city, search for some keyword (mine was “PHP”) and then at the bottom of the page, there is a little RSS link. Click it for an RSS feed for just that search. Then, whenever a new job gets posted with that keyword, your reader will let you know and you can respond quickly.