Slashdot Mirror
Resume Spamming Creates Storage, Legal Snags
selan writes "Did you know that federal law requires companies to store a copy of every single resume they receive? This applies to emailed resumes too, regardless of whether the applicant got the company's name wrong or is applying for a job that doesn't exist at the company. Employers not in compliance risk being fined and could lose government contracts. The resulting storage problems are creating massive headaches at companies who are overwhelmed with bulk-emailed resumes. The Baltimore Sun has the story."
I wonder how long it will take for /.'ers to start using this loophole to further back up Spammers and their companies.
then again.. they never did follow the law exactly, so why start now?
Ñ'
Send your resumes here: careers@microsoft.com.
Bulk mailers welcome.
you can always use /dev/null for storing all the resumes - bulk or non-bulk ;)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I know by now I filled a few hundred hard-drives. If they would just hire me, dammit, I would stop filling their hard-drives with resumes and cover letters. Deal?
Table-ized A.I.
'We feel we have to keep everything that comes to us even if they want to be a message therapist,' she said. 'I'd rather spend my time doing productive things than fighting a regulator ... having to explain what happened to a year's worth of resumes.'"
Personally, I'd rather be spending my time as a 'message therapist.'
It's a stupid law, so change it.
When HR came to me about someone mass-sending his own resume over and over again, they wanted to know if they could avoid receiving it again. I wonder if setting up a rule on the box to automatically delete the message on arrival would have been sufficient, or if it needs to be blocked before it gets there?
Another tactic for the previous article, send spammers your resume, and everyone elses you can lay your grubby mits on. Teehee.
I'm bored, can't you tell?
I wonder if the government has to keep all the resumes that are sent to them from people wanting municipal jobs and the like
I have never heard of such a law. Can anyone validate that it actually exists. What about those ads that are resumes and marketing blurbage for consulting and other services?
I found this article to be generally frustrating for several reasons:
1. They never referenced any specific law or court
interpretation of a law.
What law are they talking about specifically? How can we
check to ensure our company practices are in compliance with
"the law". Does this law apply equally to all employers or
does it only apply to employers with federal contracts as
many of the equal opportunity laws do?
2. They throw out terms like "under it's most rigid
interpretation" and "the federal governments definition".
By who's interpretation? The courts? The Equal Employment
Office? Are there any court cases we can refer to in order
to further define these interpretations? Where is this
defined? How can we verify this?
3. They don't give any specific guidelines for battling the
problem.
Is this article just writting to freak people out? They
don't even mention how long you are "required" to keep the
resumes on file, only that many people keep them on file for
a year or two. Is this their preference, or is that what
this "law" specifies.
Overall, very frustrating and light on details. How can we as a
company change our policies to be in accordance with some law,
that is being rigidly interpreted by someone, somewhere?
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
...our favorite resume spammer, Bernard Shiffman!
Do not read this sig.
I assume the storage problems are only discussing paper resumes. And even those, I would suspect the ink costs and time being gobbled on the fax machine would be more important than storage. Even if 100% are snailmailed, a small box holds a lot of paper.
There's no way this could be a problem with emailed resumes, given today's storage prices. However, the act of moving them all into the system might be costly if there's no decent CMS system in place...
CMS.... *shivers* I'm still reeling from the bad memories the last CMS thread produced.
# Erik
yup...
From the artucle, it looks like this applies only to corporate personnel departments, so I don't think I'm in violation of federal law when I delete all the resumes I get in my work inbox.
Slippery slope legal question: Does this mean it's illegal to use spam filtering software that might catch a resume en-route to a personnel dept? If so, a very large proportion of companies are breaking the law.
This is yet another example of bureaucracy getting in the way of productivity. Hopefully the government will reverse this law, but we all know how long it takes to get federal laws passed which don't benefit special interest groups, or help politicians.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
I will never do that. I mean the idea is funny, but give these guys yet another couple ways to get ahold of you and abuse you. I DON'T THINK SO!
Ted
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
All with names such as "I.P. Freely" and "Rod Johnson", degrees like 'PHD in Beastiality', and work experience like "1987-89: Instrumental in the success of bringing Vacuum Poo Forming(TM) to underpriveledged children.
Is this terribly exciting?
This is a no brainer. Most companies have places to put documents. Heck, there are great big systems that only do that, document management. Drop the resume into the document management system and set the rule to blow it away after the duration has expired. Nothing terribley exciting here.
If you are a small company, drop it onto a disk and toss it into a box labeled $current_year. This is not rocket science.
Companies being overloaded by this? Not likely unless they are so easily confused by managing documents, in which case should the company really be in the league of trying to get governement contracts?
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
Sounds to me like this could be used to DoS pretty much any company. Unless the law gets revised somehow.
What was intended when this law was created??? That sound pretty stupid to me
"Re:Apache displacing IIS?"
Heh, don't you love it when Mozilla stuff a form field and you don't notice?
I wonder how many of my posts have had this subject...
# Erik
I've thrown away plenty of resumes and I seriously doubt that there indeed is a federal law that requires you to keep them. Perhaps what they are failing to mention is that this is some sort of a requirement for government contractors.
grisha.org
- Buy a 100 gig hard drive
- Format it with random noise
- Give the random noise a PGP header
- If you're ever prosecuted for not keeping a copy of someone's resume, tell the prosecutor it's on this hard drive you've got, but you misplaced the encryption key.
Remember, the burden of proof is on the prosecutor. He has to prove that your noise isn't encrypted resumes.Someone named an OS for me.
This is a problem of large corporations who have to worry about government compliance. There aren't going to be any government officials knocking on my business's door. So what do I care if IBM, Microsoft, and Exxon have to purchase more RAID so they can store resumes? Big frickin' deal. Hell, it creates more jobs, probably, to fill the positions required to maintain the storage, and, which will be a big Slashdot plus, it'll probably create more Linux jobs.
I could be wrong. Perhaps throngs of G-Men are going to be canvassing the neighborhood urgently nabbing resume storage violators, the filthy rotten criminals that they are, but this doesn't seem like much of a post. For the large businesses for which this is a problem, my response, gosh, guys, sucks being you.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
I think I'll start sending out resumes for the position of "Resume Collector and Archiver - You Know You Need One(TM)". Anyone got a link to the relevant federal reglementation?
yes, we have no bananas
These are resumes they HAVE to keep -- not data they WANT to keep. Who cares if you can find it later?
All you have to do is to do is give them unique filenames (not hard -- a timestamp would suffice) and dump them to a harddrive. When the harddrive hits ~600 MB, burn it to CD, erase it, and toss the CD in a filing cabinet drawer.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
The underlying problem of a meddling nanny-state still remains and this is more evidence of it's obscenity.
Another obscenity is this bit towards the end:
How fortuitous that the reporter just happened to be writing this story within a few short weeks of the underlying beurocratic 'requirement' is being re-forged!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Hey! Message therapist! I could well be qualified and not know it!
"If they are a cashier at 7-Eleven and they are applying for a national sales manager [position] ... it is pretty obvious whether they fit or not," Snyder said.
The guy might have been the most qualified national sales manager they could have ever encountered; perhaps he was laid off and had to work at 7-11 in order to make ends meet?
Hammer of Truth
The biggest resumes we get are maybe 2mb, if people attach scans of old school reports or stuff like that. Most are much smaller. Artists and musicians usually link to mp3s/jpgs on their own webspace, or send VHS demo reels.
So a simple 120gb drive stores 100 of those big resumes per day, for more than a year. We add new storage space a lot faster than that.
Send this to your various levels of government. Query them later via a freedom of information action to ensure they've kept it on file.
Trolling is a art,
I don't think there needs to be any CMS, or, for that matter, any system whatsoever. The law requires them to archive it, not to archive it well. For the 90+% of resumes that have no hope in hell of ever getting hired, toss it in a folder than a little shell script tar+gzips every month and sends it off to the tape drive to never be seen again unless a regulator comes by being pissy, when you hand him a pile of tapes and he never comes again.
The 0-10% of useful resumes you keep in whatever system you already have in place for good current or future applicants.
Paper resumes can be scanned and OCR'ed and archived, and the originals recycled into toilet paper.
I fail to see the real problem here.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Bulk emailing your resume makes you look like an idiot. Jobspam is a service that will send your resume to jobs based on a complex scoring system. If the job reaches a threshold score, your resumes get sent to that job. Using it on a daily basis, you only respond to jobs that match the score threshold and it can be tweaked on the fly to improve its accuracy. Its a good tool, and it works really well for that purpose.
All mail is pre-screened. No applications or resumes are accepted without a corresponding and valid job number. Personnel accepts no unsolicted phone calls Postings always close within two weeks. It's really tough to get a job with the company because of these Federal regulations. Compliance is not an option.
The preceding comment has been reviewed and declared to be compliant with HIPPA Phase II regulations.
So reading the story. What's the difference between "standards", "guidelines", and "laws"?
oops. it should be "the", and not "teh"
Use BIG file formats . . . and if you get an offer to be president, take it and stop this madness;)
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Six months ago, when Infinity Consulting Group began looking for three new employees to upgrade computers, the company received more than 300 resumes and inquiries by e-mail.
...
The struggle was so tough for Infinity that it has yet to hire one of the three new employees it was seeking.
Maybe if they quit posting jobs they don't intend to hire anyone for, they would not be so overwhelmed. or maybe they could hire more HR or IT staff. If all the companies complaining about this hired a few people instead, they would not have this problem.
IANAL, but there is no requirement afaik for employers to look at all resumes. So maybe they have to store them all, but once they find the candidate they want to hire they can always close the position (and stop accepting resumes for it). Maybe some of those people they should be hiring could fix the software that handles the resume submissions (big companies like Dell, Microsoft, IBM, etc who get lots of resume submissions have automated software that puts a reasonable number of resumes in the hands of the person who is supposed to deal with it, and it can't be that hard to come up with a well designed system).
I can't think of any reason why this law should exist. A company should be free to do whatever they wish with the resumes they receive. If they want to store them forever, fine. If they want to delete/destroy them all upon receipt, fine.
The govenment shouldn't dictate in any way what companies do with resumes. If a company decides that six months is an adequate amount of time to store resumes, they shouldn't face penalties.
I could see some argument made for storing resumes of all candidates for one year. "Candidates" might be classified as all people who receive a phone screen or an actual face-to-face interview. This could be useful data in discrimination lawsuits, both for the plaintiff and the defending company. I see no sense in Intel having to store high school dropout Johnny Kantspell's resume if they decide he's not quite qualified for Director of R&D.
Maybe there's some great reason why resumes should be stored; I'd love to hear them if there are some. Otherwise, kill this law and let companies do what they want with resumes.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
If they are required to keep the resume whats the big deal dump all the resumes onto a CD or backup tape. Resume is probably 50Kbytes so something like 13,000 fit on a CD. I don't think the'll loose to much sleep trying to store a CD or two. Paper resumes are a bigger issue but at 37 cents to send through the mail most people don't bother anymore, scan and store even if each submitter had two pages that scan to 1MByte you can still get 650 per CD. They are required to hold onto resume not actual read it!!!!!
Well, but I'm an extreme libertarian anyway. Libertarians are like humans with a shotgun watching the stupid dogs (right) and cats (left) squabble.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
1. Read comments
2. THEN post
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
1) mass mail resume
2)*ring* 'what's that? you need more disk space? you don't say...'
Maybe companies do store the resumes somewhere, but personally, I have NEVER been contacted by a company who had my "Resume on file" from a previous job application with that company, even if they had new positions which I was qualified for. They just say that to make the pain of a rejected job candidate less.
And it makes sense -- if you're really that interested in a company, you should proactively send them a updated resume everytime you see a new job opening, and not wait for them.
Does thje Recycle Bin on my desktop count as an archive if I never bother to empty it?
Thanks,
Helen Freklen
Human Resources
Employers it seems to me, fail to realize the potential in some job candidates more often than when they do realize potential.
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
Microsoft, violating federal law? I'm shocked!
Create public folder for receving resumes. Create a mailbox and forward a copy to the mailbox as well. Perform Brick level backup and the emailed resumes will get backed up on a per message basis. Every month or so delete the messages from the mailbox and the public folder.
Legally you are following this since all resumes can be retrieved from off site storage.
Once it gets on the Federal Register, not much.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Look up EEOC 1607. It's a big law, and part of it requires that you keep any materials that you used as part of your selection process. It's absolutely ludicrous if you ask me, and I've never heard of anyone actually following it before now. But believe it or not, it is a law.
I suspect most/many companies are very low-tech -- the resumes are probably printed out and reviewed that way, hence the one college having an entirely too large filing system. I couldn't imagine that, this day and age, most people snail mail their resumes.
Thanks,
--
Matt
I find it disturbing that Tigger has no eyes there. Nevermind that confetti comes out his nose!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The requirement at issue is found in the Equal Employment Oppoertunity Commission's regulations interpreting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Title VII prohibits employers of 15 or more persons from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, national origin, religion, etc.
The EEOC has issued regulations that interpret the law. Among those regulations are recommendations as to how long employers should retain various items of paperwork. The article stems from a misunderstanding as to the meaning of 29 C.F.R. s. 1602.14, which states:
What the article fails to acknowledge is that the EEOC's regulations are nothing more than recommendations, and are neither specifically enforcible by the EEOC nor binding on the Courts. Note 29 C.F.R. s. 1602.12: In other words, the article is pure FUD: the EEOC recommends that you keep applications and resumes for at least a year, but doing so is neither required nor something that you can be punished for. (As a matter of corporate policy, it makes sense to retain bona fide resumes for at least that long in case of litigation, but what is "smart" and what is "required by law" are often two very different things.)...just don't forget to make your resume a 2GB PDF file.
Cheers
-b
This is why some information is better stored on a central repositry. 75-100% of all the resumes sent out by one person will be identical, or nearly so. Store the identical part centrally for all companies, and then store the diff locally.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Simply don't accept any resumes at all from them. If you don't receive the resume, you don't have to store it. Or did Congress make those resume laws so far reaching that you can't do this?
-- Will program for bandwidth
Six months ago...the company received more than 300 resumes and inquiries by e-mail. Dealing with all those e-mails - many replete with misspellings, wrong company names and nonexistent qualifications - was a nightmare
What is wrong with these people that they can't read and save 300 Word documents in six months? Hell, the project I am working on has at *least* 300 use cases and requirements specs stashed away in several different LAN folders, CVS branches, and SharePoint. And we didn't receive them, we *wrote* them! We'll never read them again, and we'll store them forever. And they are also full of: misspellings, wrong company names and nonexistent qualifications
I want to shag all of these lovely girls.. NOW!!
I'm too sexy for you.
I'm amazed that as of this writing nobody has posted a flood of resumes to this thread.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
That law should also make it mandatory for employers to manually acknowledge they've seen your resume, by electronic or postal mail, even if they acknowledge with a fill-in-the-blank form letter. Nothing is more insulting to a person interested in working for an organization than to be ignored. Companies ought to be grateful.
- IP
I think that's entirely reasonable.
Once the myth that a resume can get a person a job is finally put to rest companies will continue to be flooded with them.
My advice to anybody in this flat IT economy is as follows: 1. Get a job any job. If you aren't working, nobody is going to hire you. You are an "untouchable" when the imagine you at home in front of the T.V. Plus, companies can smell desperation and fear a mile away.
2. If you can't find a job in IT, find one that almost sounds like a technological position. This could include putting together computer desks for a "temp" agency--anything to break the inertia of unemployment.
This is just my humble opinion from years of watching resumes being filed like so many paper tombstones.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
"We feel we have to keep everything that comes to us even if they want to be a message therapist,"
Or, a proofreader for the Baltimore Sun, unless there is such a thing as a message therapist.
I wonder when spammers will start attaching resumes to their spam to make companies have to let the spam through, even store the spam for five years...
Companies should be allowed to have published criteria for formats of resumes they will accept.
Im sure there are some common sense rules for dead-true resumes. I would hope they arent required to accept or file a resume printed on used toilet paper, or in 30 point type on a 4x8 foot sheet of plywood.
So same should there be some common sense rules for resumses - not required to accept or file resumes not in RFC-documented formats, for example, or perhaps even requiring them to be in plain text. Im sure the size of a DOC file for a given resume, compared to a plaintext version of the same resume, is at least similar to the comparison between a sheet of plyood as compared to a US-letter or A4 page of paper.
Allowing PDF format might be a consideration, since they could print those and add them to their dead-tree file. Of course, that would cost them money in ink and paper, which doesnt seem fair.
No, I think the best thing would be to ALLOW applicants to email resumes, but not require companies to supply the computer equipment or ink and paper to file them. If an applicant wants to force a company to file their resume, they should be required to pay for the paper and postage to send them a hardcopy.
Of course, nothing word prohbit a company from choosing to save or print/file resumes they got. So they still could if they wanted.
Next week, we'll find out that it's illegal to toss away any solicited material that is dropped off at or in front of your office. We'll all be forced to keep a full pile of restaurant menus at our workspaces.
I don't get it, assuming there is such a law, then you basically have to keep all the resume for which the sender can prove he/she sent it to you, that is fedex or other courrier companies and registered mail.
They dont really have to keep anything else.
Of course I would never suggest a Distributed Resume Attack be implemented against any particular organization.
Worst case--what--you get a job.
Hey, Melinda, Where are we going to store all these Osama bin Lauden resmues?
Gee, Bill, I guess we could put 'em in the warehouse next to the Sadaam Hussein job applications.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Hey turdy boy, I've worked at 7-11 for six years and I'm damn proud of it. I started as a cashier and moved up to part-time assistant manager, then to night manager, then to store manager. After a couple years as store manager, I was promoted to the district manager overseeing several stores. Yes, it's true that some cashiers are losers... it's a high-turnover position often filled by people who just want a quick buck. But some people, like me, are dedicated hard workers who can actually make a difference in the company. I hope to be a regional manager soon, at which point I can start building my pension and retire with the company.
I certainly would prefer a candidate who worked at 7-11 for a year vs someone who sat around the house and watched tv during the same time. Wouldn't you?
http://saveie6.com/
Phew! Now that big business is suffering in a direct way, we'll see some action on making spam illegal!
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Yeah, because sad messages would suck...
I applied for an admin asst. job, and got a call back about a year later. I thanked them profusely, but already had a job.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Secondly, what's the big deal with emailed resumes anyway? Store 'em in the form they came in on. When you get 650 meg of them, burn to CD and toss it in a filing cabinet. That's a LOT of resumes.
Bouncing back a form letter saying 'not accepting applications' tends to indicate that the person is not an applicant, as well. It's FUD. Cynically, it's advertising for lawyers, who will tell you where you stand. For a fee, of course.
The "piracy tax" in the US is only placed on CDs that have been specifically flagged as being taxed. (i.e. they have a bit that will allow standalone audio CD recorders to burn to them.) For PC usage, this flag is irrelevant.
Piracy taxes in other countries are irrelevant since the cause of the problem is a law in the United States.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I guess it comes down to a choice of style. Is chronological better? I dunno.
My resume lists my significant experience, with detail, and then I have an "other experience" section further down which does not contain detail (it says I worked there, for such and such a time, in such a position), and is for positions where I did things other than my current occupation.
I'd prefer someone who did work at 7-11 for a year, but if I'm reading one of a thousand resumes for a position and the first thing I see on there (in a purely chronological resume) is 7-11 manager, I might not bother reading on.
Any personnel or employment record made or kept by an employer (including but not necessarily limited to requests for reasonable accommodation, application forms submitted by applicants and other records having to do with hiring, promotion, demotion, transfer, lay-off or termination, rates of pay or other terms of compensation, and selection for training or apprenticeship) shall be preserved by the employer for a period of one year
A resume may not be an "application," but it certainly is a "record having to do with hiring."
More to the point, you'd be the laughingstock of the industry if you required people seeking professional and executive-level positions to fill out your "application form." Application forms = cashier at McDonald's.
This might be urban legend, but I thought it sounded like fun. Should you ever get caught shoplifting or something like that at a retail establishment, before you leave, ask them for an application for employment. Most likely whoever is intimidating you in the back room will tell you to screw off, in which case you have grounds to sue them for refusing to give you an application.
Anyone ever heard of anything like this? I can't see myself getting the chance to test it out, but I could this being a good tactic for motivated protesters & whatnot.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
www.recruitforce.com have an asp based Applicant Tracking System, that solves this problem
So, let's do it! Now, can anyone publish the list of email from goverment job pages?
Less is more !
===============
Its amazing that so many companies still use email to handle the volume of resumes. There are some really appropriate tools out there like Recruitforce.com that automatically sort and file incoming applications/resumes for you.
Has anyone here seen an increase in the use of systems like this or is it too early?
if receive can be properly defined as "in plain text only" then its very easy to store them all. none of that extra 3megs for being word document crap. ;)
From here
"Companies who contract or subcontract with the government and who have more than 150 employees are required to hold the resumes of job applicants for two years as well as keep a breakdown of applicant demographics, such as gender, race and job applied for, says Lorber, a former deputy assistant secretary of labor and director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs."
The purpose is to make sure that government contractors comply with EEOC regulations in regards to hiring decisions, which is a good thing. Obviously the 60,000 spam resumes were not taken into account.
So, employers -- who have been canning people right and left, and who post ridiculous job descriptions so that they can justify outsourcing positions instead of hiring for them -- are now experiencing a crisis in which the masses of unemployed and desperate people are sending them resumes that, by law, they must track and store? How amusing. I noticed that they're trying to call unsolicited resumes "spam", as though an unemployed and desperate worker is somehow committing a sin in attempting to find work. How compassionate HR managers are! How touching is their depth of feeling for their fellow man.
Of course, what is *really* funny is, these idiots are so technically inept that they consider dealing with a few thousand resumes *difficult*. Perhaps if they hadn't fired all the tech staff, someone in the office would be able to do the following:
1. Set up a shared directory on one of the office PCs, mapping that as a network drive for everyone else.
2. Inform people that whenever a resume comes in, they should save it to the shared drive in a subfolder named after the "applicant", along with attachments.
3. Have someone periodically dump the shared drive to a CD-Rom (say, when the shared folder hits 500MB?). Write the date on the CD label, and store it somewhere convenient. Then, clean out the shared folder.
4. Stop worrying and let all the HR suits go back to playing solitaire and tormenting "applicants".
Oh, but you'll say, "they get and track paper resumes, too -- what now, shared-folder-boy?"
Easy enough. On the same PC where you're storing the emailed resumes, hook up a fifty dollar scanner. When a resume comes in, have one of the interns scan it and save it in the shared directory and subdirectory named after the person. The additional space being used just increases the rate at which you're burning CDs.
Wanna go back and find someone's resume? Fetch the CD for the approximate time span in which the resume was sent and look the person up. This should take maybe ten minutes (including walking down to the file closet and digging up the CD).
Unless you're IBM or something, this should be more than sufficient. Companies like IBM have enough staff to create something a little more comprehensive.
Of course, most companies DID fire all the tech staff, so they're probably shit out of luck. Maybe if they give the homeless webmaster who sits in front of their building a doughnut or something, he'll put something together for them. Who knows? Or he might just spit in their eye, kick them in the shins, steal the doughnut, and walk away, muttering about "PR Flacks"...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
The question I kept asking myself as I read the article was, "What's so hard about just tarring, gzipping and burning each month's mail spool to CD-ROM?"
3000 resumes a month isn't likely to fill even one CD.
I suspect that this article is actually a complaint about those pesky equal-opportunity employment regulations.
They haven't even stopped yet, and we're talking about letting them resume spamming?!
oh, wait... you meant "resumé", didn't you?
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Ok, so then when you need info on one of those resumes you do a word search through lots of compressed files? I don't think so...
If you want quick and easy access to that information, it must be uncompressed (~12k) and then it must be in a database for easy access. That (believe it or not) makes it about 5x the size it once was (DB indexes, unique keys, etc.) So now we're at about 50k, or 24 GB a year. The database will probably need to be configured for a max of 2 years worth (just in case you can't delete one year for awhile) which is close to 50 GB. And sifting through 24GB of data takes a big, well designed database. You Are Now Well Beyond Microsoft Access!
In short, no it's not cheap if you actually want to access and use the information.
- Sig
Translation: How many resume .doc/.pdf files can fit on a single DVD-R?
Assign them sequential file names, put applicant name, position, date received, DVD disc number, and file name. Even Access could handle this for all the applicants any but the largest companies receive. Storing emailed resumes is probably not the problem.
And get those Disney auto-destructing DVDs to handle eventual automated disposal.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I always put rsum spammers in the database of "morons not to hire, no matter how desperate you are". Don't all companies?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
What we really want to know is: What does CHOMSKY think about this?
"Personally, I'd rather be spending my time as a 'message therapist.'"
Unfortunately only "spin doctors" are qualified enough to fill that position.
Man, to get the resume file that big... I'd have to include a picture of my penis!
Assuming the vast majority of resume's are hard copy, then OCR is your friend. Assuming the resume is a word document, save as an ascii file.
Assuming a given company gets 1 million resumes a year, typical "page" of data is roughly 5K at best {assuming 60 lines 80 col). So roughly 10gigs of data assuming 2 pages per entry, and both pages full. This data can easily be compressed to maxamize storage.
The solution seems simple
1. Evaluate entry... if qualified to *promising canidate* move up in the pile.
2. If not qualified, then archive monthly... CD or DVD media should be adquate if your intent is to actually access the data. Date your media monthly. After required period of time, destroy or recycle the media.
The only flaw in my procedure is the fact that raw text isn't nessicarly searchable easily. While I personaly could deal with the "search" or "find" fuction included in respective operating systems I use, in conjuction with less or van berg's list program. Idealy a human element would be required in order to flag the fields to be imported into a really basic database. Either that or complience with the given companies software processing.
But call me silly, but this seems like a project for a first year information systems design student to accomplish.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
You know, glancing at some of the highly moderated posts, nobody has seemed to mention why these companies would want to hire these people who mass-mail resumes. They're just as bad as spammers.
Mind you, I realize that this article says they have to keep a copy on hand by this law (no I didn't RFTA, sorry), but can't they just make it company policy to not accept mass-mailed resumes?
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
I work for a company that specializes in corporate hiring products, we advise our clients to be very careful about the word "applicant". The laws mentioned here spcifically refer to "applicants", if you use a pre-screening tool to weed out unqualified people, then you do not have to keep their information. If the person passes the pre-screen, then they move on to "applicant" status. You can specify that all employment requests must go through your pre-screening process and refuse to accept any unsolicited "applicants". It is an issue of semantics, but an important one.
if you don't feel better tomorrow, we'll just cut your legs off about here. - Theodoric of York
Even hundreds of thousands of resumes would fit on what, a few 750 MB zip drives? Where exactly is the big problem?
fdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhaf sfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdha fsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdh afsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasd hafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfias dhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfia sdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfi asdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdf iasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhd fiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuh dfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiu hdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsi uhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfs iuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdf siuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfd fsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsf dfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafs fdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhaf sfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdha fsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdhafsfdfsiuhdfiasdh afs
Half of the résumés for a CTO position were not received over the Internet. Are companies obliged to accept anything from such blatantly unqualified retards?
If you list that the only resumes that will be acknowledged will follow a specific format, that requires some sort of human intervention, would that be legal?
For example, emailing your resume will result in a bounce message saying that the company doesn't accept resumes via email. Then, have a webform that requires them to be uploaded and have one of those wavy-text checks.
Any thoughts on the legality of that?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
For a tr0ll, you are not very amusing. Maybe you should start over, eh?
I feel like painting my resume on the sides of a giant wooden box and shipping it to:
The SCO Group
355 South 520 West
Suite 100
Lindon, Utah 84042 USA
It might be expensive though.
I bet some people will even sign them up for free magazines and other offers delivered to their physical address.
That's funny. I work for the government and we don't keep a damn thing. I just deleted another resume yesterday from a clueless twerp applying for a job that's been filled for a year.
So when all those companies said, "We don't have a position for you, but we'll keep your resume on file," it was only because they HAD to. I thought I might have a chance someday...
I understand most mispellings of common words, but "Artucle"????
Geez, talk about a lazy speller.
Who cares? If you can't read it in the Times, is it worth reading?
Think also of the cost of storing copies of all the pink slips these days :-)
Table-ized A.I.
I guess our good friend Bernard Shifman has secured a place in posterity...
Sorry to ruin your joke, but as /dev/urandom uses the Yarrow PRNG, it is possible to construct a "resume" which could not possibly have come from it. This is, IMHO, a weakness of the PRNG. It cannot, for instance, output 100 spaces in a row (exactly how many it can output depends on the implementation).
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
... you make a good case for on-demand online schooling. Then any embarassing "blank spaces" in your timeline history can be easily explained.
work
work
work
school (instead of 'lost job, worked mickey d's part time, looking for a better job in spare time, got to level 83 in unrealdoominator, etc')
work
Looks perfectly fine then.
Having to read all those resumes?
Worse, having to be organised enough to store them?
When are the poor souls supposed to do their mandatory 4 hours window-staring and two hours clock watching per day, not to mention the strenuous shifting from buttock to buttock that most seem to indulge in?
Can't the fscking idiots handle the concept of creating an 'unsuitable' folder in their email, and dumping the crap resumes there?
HR people are generally the least competent form of life after recruitment consultants.
Expect me to feel no sympathy for either.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
A number of viruses disguise themselves as resumes. Does this law also force companies to keep those? Do companies still have the right to disinfect these mails?
"It would still be worth it though, just to see a new posting for the "lucky" person whose job it will be to copy/scan/decode lead-plate/clay tablet/written-in-Mayan resumes..."
That and the one to replace "Bob".
imagine a beowulf cluster of legal snags
Repeal the DMCA!
someone is sitting on a mountain of fake poo in their million dollar mansion laughing at your post
;)
the pet rock? that was a great invention
I think you've invented the IIF (Infinite Improbability File) system. Lot's of space in that one; But it's probible that it's write only.
....
Quick Patent It!
profit!
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
Any company that gets 1 million resumes a year and: can't buy 1M * 50K max (compressed)= 50GB =~ $60 worth of storage a year DESERVES to get fined. And yes, they were complaining about electronic resumes.
Granted, if they got 1 million physical resumes, they might need to hire a single pathetic high-school kid to heap the pages and run them through a b/w, low-res scanner with a shredder on the other end.
Goddess, people fucking complain about the stupidest things!
This could be pure urban legend, but I've heard that the IRS is required by law to keep anything you send them. Apparently, more than a few people have mailed them bricks, and even broken refrigerators.
;)
I'd tend to think that the law was eventually somehow clarified to note that random garbage irrelevant to the IRS's tasks don't have to be retained? If not, I could have a lot of fun...
________________________________________________
suwain_2
This is not a problem. Back in 97 or so most people were moving to electronic storage. My company was an outsourced provider of electronic resume storage and we could store hundreds of thousands of resumes without problem. With todays storage capacity, millions should be easy too. For paper versions, just scan them in and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) them to reduce the file sizes, unless the law specifically requires paper copies, then this is not a major problem for large companies.
If someone needs some help with this, then you should contact me and I'll set you up. The software cost about 10-20k at the time and hardware was about 5k, running it was a minimum wage job mostly. My consulting charge is negotiable depending on the requirements. But there were plenty of companies doing this sort of thing just a few years ago, I have to think someone is still providing this service.
Gov't: Where are all those resumes?
MSFT: It wasn't our fault! Our database crashed!
Gov't: What kind of database was it?
MSFT: An acces--err, Oracle. Yes, that's it!
Either way, methinks Microsoft is out of a client.
[insert witty comment here]
Because that mofo's gonna be looking for work in 18 months.
Personally, my skill-set and career-history can only be adequately described with two tonnes of angry African white rhino. Words on paper simply will not do me justice. Let's see them store that.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
maybe you can also get a book on correct semi-colon useage ;)
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Ah, but the real question is, would Bob's replacement look up at the hole in the ceiling, and down at the big red dent in the floor, and decide he *really* wanted to go back to school instead?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!