How to Insert an Image Into a Craigslist Job Ad (3 Easy Steps)

Rob Kelly
Latest posts by Rob Kelly (see all)

Remember the early days of Match.com when the personal ads with the pictures were the ones that received more click-throughs than the ads without?

A job ad on Craigslist is no different. All other things equal, a candidate is more likely to click on a search result that has an “img” next to it (signifying that an image is inside) then they are clicking on one without an image.

And once a candidate is viewing the job ad, the image is an opportunity to better communicate your message. Ad ad guru David Oglivy famously said, “the more you tell the more you sell” — and a photo or image allows you to tell the reader/candidate a lot in a short time (check out his book Oglivy on Advertising for dozens of his favorite ads (nearly every one has a picture in it).

A few of us refer to using visuals in job ads “visual recruiting.”

Here are the steps for getting an image inside your Craigslist ad.

1) Locate An Image from a Hosted Site

The image you pick must have its own URL. To find hosted images, go to any Web page and:

  1. Mouse over an image and look for the file name (e.g. Volunteer-5.jpg is the image we chose;
  2. View the source code of that page (on Chrome you click “View” and “View Source” from the menu) and “find” the image file on the page  (on a Mac, you use Command F to “find” mentions of the search string on the page).

2) Insert The HTML for Hosted Image Into Your Job Ad

Next, just paste the HTML that you had found in Step 1 into the job posting itself (make sure that the HTML starts with a “<” and ends with a “>.”

3) Confirm That The Inserted Image Appears

Your image should appear in the preview Craigslist shows you (below is an example).

If it looks good, you can go ahead and publish the job and an “img” will appear to the right of the job in Craigslist search results and you will see the image within the actual job ad.

Click here for a list of acceptable HTML for Craigslist job ads and some examples of how to insert HTML here.

by in Job Ads