Joel Spolsky writes about the challenges of using internet based advertising to find qualified applicants for Fog Creek Software.

Until now we’ve been hiring rarely and quietly, but lately our sales are so strong we can’t quite keep up.

My old theory of hiring was to post a job listing on Monster or Craigslist and then sort through the massive pile of unqualified applicants in hopes of finding the needle in the haystack.

That hasn’t worked so well. In the future I’m going to try putting up semi-permanent job listings for all the kinds of people we might hire on the Fog Creek website and see if that gets us a slower trickle of more qualified job applicants.

Spam is what happens whenever there is completely frictionless communication– witness email spam, resume spam, comment spam, search engine optimization spam, and more. It’s only a matter of time before social networks reach critical mass and start having relationship spam.

A major focus of the next generation of internet services will be to create systems and communities that counter spam.

Spam victims of all kinds are so busy fighting their current fires that it’s difficult to even consider alternatives. Alternatives often require more up front planning and more apparent effort. But at the end of the day the effort invested is far less than that spent fruitlessly wading through spam.