Resume Spamming Redux

wiredog writes "Remember this story about the guy who spammed his resume? Well, now the Washington Post is reporting that resume spamming is a trend. Enough of a trend to have generated a backlash!" Amusing fallout from an amusing story, and hopefully a lesson for others too.

Comments

Re:Job sites

[GTRacer]

True, but at least the companies you're 1-clicking the resumes to are ASKING for applicants. Maybe not in your field, but they ARE looking. And you're most likely sending to the H.R. contact that set up the company account.

True resume spam goes to companies whether or not they're hiring and to people inside that may or may not have hire & fire capabilities.

That said, I wish Monster could find me a frigging job here...

GTRacer
- I can do lots of things on a computer

My Monster.com Resume put me on every spam list.

[Confessed Geek]

I can testify to the reverse spam. I read an article a few months ago about how spammers get your email address. They addressed a number of ways but the missed the one that got me.

My publicly viewable resume.

I was job hunting and put my resume - full name,address, phone removed - up on Monster.com, hotjobs, dice, ect. I created a new email account, just for recieving responses. Well, the online resume only got me calls from head hunters, but withing a couple months that address was recieving spam like crazy, while my other more guarded address, even the ones I use for online registration and other "unsafe" purposes were still relativly spam free.

This leads me to believe that places like HotJobs and Monster are harvested by bots/spiders for email addresses on a regular basis... If the sites themselves aren't selling them.

Moral of this story is if you post a public resume, keep a seperate mail account for it.

Re:Doesn't seem wise...

[KurdtX]

Yes this happened to me. I was stupid enough to use my "main" private email account that was not previously recieving spam (apart from forwards from my friends). Now spam has escalated at an increasing rate, every week it seems my daily rate has incremented.

The humorus side to this is watching the evolution of those who were spamming me. First it was the headhunters and other job-search web sites (blocked some of them), then it sorta moved to "special offers" (ironic they buy their list from those who spam the unemployed); the "make money at home" came soon after that, followed by all the rest of the herbal viagra and diet pill "we spam anyone" stuff. Only now am I getting the good stuff, here's to hot young teen lesbian whores!

The REAL problem is the current way jobs are ....

[Skapare]

The REAL problem is the current way jobs are found, or rather, NOT found. And this existed during the peak of the bubble, making it hard for employers to find good people even though many good people existed looking for work even at that time. That problem is that connecting between employer and employee candidates is so ineffective.

Job boards are the rage. But they have only a small percentage of the jobs. Most of the jobs on the boards are posted by professional recruiters and their firms. But the majority of job openings are not listed there because they are not sent to recruiters. These are "less crucial" openings that don't justify the cost of a headhunter, which can be as much as the employee's full first year salary. And most businesses simply don't want to deal with the hassle and cost of posting all their own job openings on all the job boards. It costs a few thousand to post a single job opening to all the major job boards (there are too many of them).

A better designed job board would help. Doing searches on skills, job functions, and other criteria is in many just a cheap string search. And in those few that do more than a string search, they are often limited to listing just skills alone, instead of also other things like what job function roles one is looking for, or needs. I remember getting calls many times for someone to do a programming job in C++ even though I was only open to network management work. The reason was that I have nearly 20 years experience programming in C (not C++), and some board lumped C and C++ together, and never took into account that this was merely a skill and not what I was actually looking to do. I wonder how many potential employers skipped over my online profile just because I looked like a programmer to them (when searching candidates on these boards, employers see profiles first, and have to take extra steps to see the actual resume).

Then there is the fee to post a job. And the fee to view resumes. While the job boards do need to make money these days (especially considering their investors want to see a return on investment), this still remains a big obstacle to getting jobs listed. Some industry analysts say there are nearly a million job openings in high tech even now; a figure I have some doubts about, but I can't totally discard the possibility because I know the vast majority of them won't be posted on the big boards, even if the market was booming (and certainly not during a recession).

It sure would be a big plus to people looking for work if there was a totally free board (free to post a job, free to post a resume, free to search jobs, and free to search resumes). I've even suggested that employers wanting to hire people on H-1B visas should be required to post on the major boards for 3 months before applying to grant the visa, and a free super job board might even make that viable (and get more Americans back to work at American companies ... and maybe similar in other countries, as I hear Germany has a problem similar to H-1B). The problem will be paying for such a board (bandwidth isn't free, now), and advertising probably doesn't cut it anymore.