designstate

Spencer Rhodes

Spencer is an industrial designer, graphic designer, and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is available for hire or for projects. Please contact him for more information.

Spencer Rhodes's web site: http://www.spencer-rhodes.com/.
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I’ve been housemate hunting the last week or so.  I’ve come up with what I think are some pretty smart things to make the process easier.

1. Use a junk email address (this is a no brainer).  I used GMail.
2. Get a free voice mail number from Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral)
3. I set up 30 minute interviews with candidates using GenBook.
4. Using Gmail, set up keyword filters and labels

1. I think I can skip part one, this should be fairly obvious.  I used GMail, so much of this article is GMail specific.

2. With google Voice I can differentiate incoming calls based on if they’re known callers or not, and have different greetings based on several different groups.  Once a call comes in, I can take the call, send it to voice mail, listen in on the voice mail, or take the call and record it.  This is so handy since I don’t necessarily want to take every single call that comes in about a room.  This isn’t as big an issue this time around because this time I didn’t list the number on the Craigslist posting.  But even so, it gives me one more level of separation and screenability.  You can tell a lot about someone by how they sound over the phone and the kinds of messages they leave.  If they ramble on and on and repeat themselves.  If they leave out important information or sound like Eor from Winnie The Pooh.

3. The last time I did a housemate search, it was useful to setup 30 minute interviews with individuals so they could feel at ease instead of the cattle call meetings San Francisco is so famous for.  It worked fairly well but was troublesome for me to keep track of all the different candidates and when they were available and when they canceled appointments with me.  So this time I found a service called GenBook.  With GenBook I can specify what my “open hours” are, and how long appointments last for specific services.  I only have one “service” for my purpose: candidate interviews.  So that was simple.  I can then give screened candidates the public URL to my GenBook and they can schedule a time that works for them in the blocks I’ve set aside for interviewing.  GenBook then emails me to tell me someone has made an appointment.  Tat saves me a lot of hassle. Genbook also lets me automatically give them the address to the apartment upon successful appointment scheduling so I can keep it hidden from the masses.

4. The tool I find the most useful is GMail’s filters & labels.  I set up a bunch of labels for various demographic attributes that are preferred in our search.  I won’t tell you what they are because I don’t want anyone yelling discrimination or anything like that at me.  I have preferences for housemates and I’m going to filter.  We all do.  Get over it.

As I was saying.  After making demographic labels I set up a bunch of filters based on keywords that fit each label and automagically applies it.  For instance: I have a label called “Animals” because there aren’t any pets allowed in our flat.  That being stated in our Craigslist posting, people still inquire when they have a cute Mr. Kitty.  So I have a filter set up searching for words like “dog”", “puppy”, “cat”, “pet” and various pluralities thereof.  Anything that matches that gets automagically labeled as “Animals.”  I know these filters aren’t very intelligent, so I will go through those inquiries that have enough other qualifying attributes manually.  But if that’s the only label attached to an inquiry, I probably won’t even look at it.

It’s sort of like getting an executive summary.  With the high volume of inquiries in San Francisco, it can be very time consuming weeding through the chaff.  It’s not a perfect system, but helpful and a step in the right direction.