Searching ALL Craigslist resumes with one string!

Searching ALL Craigslist resumes with one string!

Here’s a way to search ALL Craigslist resumes at once, without having to go city by city, and running the same search over and over again. I think I’ve found a solution that is much faster and way more effective! In any case, it’s a good bit of information to have, just in case you ever need it.

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So I see a common denominator when opening the resume link of any craigslist sub-site. It is the change in city. The things that stay the same across the entire site are craigslist.org and the inclusion of /res/ in the URL…example:

http://sandiego.craigslist.org/res/
http://raleigh.craigslist.org/res/
http://dallas.craigslist.org/res/

If you are narrowing your search further there would be a sub region added to the URL, but I wouldn’t recommend it…example:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/res/ 
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/res/

http://newyork.craigslist.org/res/ 
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/res/

Since we don’t want to narrow the search geographically we want to isolate the common factors. And since the titles are different, depending on the author of the posting, we want to exclude an intitle: operator. The things we want to have remain in the search string would be craigslist.org and res. The commands would be site:craigslist.org AND inurl:res Just put these commands in your normal Boolean String.

Here’s what I was thinking as an example: Software (engineer OR developer OR architect) C++ site:craigslist.org inurl:res  or inurl:/res/ (whichever command would have higher yield)

Try it out…and tell me what you think? Let me know if you have any questions about this.

Tags: Boolean, Craigslist

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Irina Shamaeva on November 11, 2008 at 6:44pm

Hi Amber,

When you build a search string and want to find local candidates you may want to use the city/state names, area codes, zip codes, names of local competitors etc. as part of your search string. Let me know if you want advice on that.

However, since craigslist (used by Shane in the posting above) is local by its nature, I think it would be the easiest to simply look only on local craigslist(s). Here's how.
First, go on http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites and find the site names that you need based on geography.
Suppose you look in OR. You will pick from the URLs for the local craigslists:
portland.craigslist.org
eugene.craigslist.org
corvallis.craigslist.org
etc.

Your search will then look like this:
(engineer OR developer OR architect) C++ site:craigslist.org inurl:res inurl:portland OR inurl:eugene OR inurl:corvallis

If there's only one local site you could search there using craigslist search itself; however, Shane's way may still help a bit since (I think) craigslist doesn't support Boolean operators.

One last thing, do not expect Google to pick all the resumes. It takes time for Google to come back to a site to index it. You will probably see just a portion.

One very last thing, some links you will get on Google will end in something like /res/index200.html and those are lists of resumes, not resumes.

Hope this helps.
Irina

Amber L Hall said:

I want to narrow down my search geographically. My cients don't want to relo anyone, especially in this market. Please add the geographically parameters using your example URL (Software (engineer OR developer OR architect) C++ site:craigslist.org inurl:res) and repost.
Thanks!

Permalink Reply by Karen Litchfield on November 11, 2008 at 10:44pm

Hi everyone,

OK, I tried this and got zero results. I still consider myself to be a rookie with search strings. Can you tell me what I did wrong? I am looking for a Marketing Manager in the LA/Irvine area and this was my string...

(marketing AND manager) site:craigslist.org inurl:res inurl:san diego OR inurl:los angeles OR bakersfield

Thanks!

Karen

Permalink Reply by Irina Shamaeva on November 12, 2008 at 8:52pm

Hi Karen,

Try (marketing AND manager) site:craigslist.org inurl:res inurl:sandiego OR inurl:losangeles OR inurl:bakersfield
(it seems your results will come from LA and SD but not bakersfield). Notice that I removed some spaces in your string.

-Irina

Permalink Reply by Craig Evans on November 26, 2008 at 2:31pm

This is great, Thank you

Permalink Reply by Susan Hand on December 9, 2008 at 12:37pm

Thank you so much for sharing this.

Permalink Reply by Glenn Gutmacher on December 9, 2008 at 6:42pm

Some search engines won't like the use of AND (that's only needed on sites like Monster), nor the lack of parentheses around the OR clause. Better syntax for Google (this also runs on Yahoo, BTW, and may yield different results):

marketing manager site:craigslist.org inurl:res (inurl:sandiego OR inurl:losangeles OR inurl:bakersfield)

As for the earlier comment that some Google results will end in something like /res/index200.html and those are lists of resumes, not resumes, you can eliminate those by adding -inurl:index to the end of your query.

Permalink Reply by Shari Burke on December 10, 2008 at 11:05am

I am looking for oil and gas engineers and they can come from anywhere as long as they have the proper Visa or are a US citizen. How would I do that? Also, is this string put in Google and Yahoo or other search engines in the same format? Thanks! Shari

Permalink Reply by Jay La Forest on December 12, 2008 at 12:10pm

Thanks for the info
Jay

Permalink Reply by Shane Threatt on January 5, 2009 at 1:46pm

When writing a search string the "OR" operator should always be contained within a parenthesis.
ex: (developer OR engineer)

The "AND" operator is ALWAYS given (unless you command otherwise) and doesn't need to be included in your string.

If you are looking to search within a specific geographical area, take a minute to explore craigslist and take notice of the common denominators in the url....like region or sub region. If it's assigned to the sfbay url, then sfbay will be your common denominator. (Also, make sure to have the correct format - like spacing)

example:

site:craigslist.org inurl:res (inurl:sandiego OR inurl:bakersfield OR inurl:losangeles OR inurl:inlandempire OR inurl:orangecounty OR inurl:ventura) (marketing (manager OR director OR lead OR senior))

Running this search on Google will give you 297 results while the same string on Y! only gives you 16 results, and 0 on live.

play with it...try different operators and see what works for you. Craigslist isn't going to have an unlimited amount of resume, especially with a geographically restricted search. There will be a few good FREE candidate leads in there for you to consider.

Permalink Reply by Ken Kimbrough on January 7, 2009 at 11:58am

I'm new to this group, but somewhat familiar with internet sourcing and Craigslist. After spending an inordinate amount of time noodling out how to search Craig for resumes and setting up a search tool for Craig (www.itjob4u.com/erbauer), I discovered Craigspal. The free version displays some ads which aren't all that intrusive. I expect the paid version eliminates the ads. I haven't investigated if there are any other advantages to the paid version because I get most of what I need with "freebie".

What I like about Craigspal is that you can create global searches (in the most literal sense, since it allows searching other countries) or geographic searches (country, region, or city) and allows you to focus on just resumes. If you want to get out of the business of creating, tweaking, etc. of Google searches for CraigsList, CraigsPal is a winner.

Permalink Reply by Irina Shamaeva on January 8, 2009 at 5:20pm

Here's a slight correction: There's no need for parenthesis in Shane's Google example.
(If you are writing your string and are uncertain, start with the advanced search page and take a look at the string Google constructs.)

Also, while comparing the success of a search string on different search engines it's good to make sure that you follow the syntax of each one.

-Irina

Shane Threatt said: