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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."
It's a stupid law, so change it.
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
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
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.
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()?
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
It may depend on what is ment by received. If the emailed resume just hitting the email gateway is sufficient to be considered as being received then dumping the resume even at that point would not be allowed. On the other hand if it has to be in HR's hands before being considered received then you'd be fine dumping it at the gateway.
I wonder if you could pattern match the received resumes and only keep one copy if they're exactly the same?
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
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
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.
Well, at least the people complaining about having to process the resumes have a job. Think of the additional thousands that would be pounding the street if the HR business suddenly got efficient.
If businesses ran at peak efficiency, there would probably be only about 10% employment. The rest of us would have to run around and find a way to make the market inefficient enough so that we can get food in our mouths.
The article also misses the cause of the problem. The problem is not too broad a defintion of an application. The problem is that the companies are storing the resumes in paper form. Storing the resumes in electronic form would save a few thousand acres of file cabinets and a few forests full of trees. Microsoft could fit all of its resumes on a $100 drive.
To be honest, I think companies revel in the tens of thousands of resumes they receive. When you have 100,000 resumes piled up, it makes it a lot easier for the company to hire who you want as you can flood the court will a torrent of documents when the lawyers come to sue, and when you have that many documents you can prove anything you want.
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.
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.
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
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!
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."
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
Score: 4 Interesting?
How is this interesting?
Interesting would be a slashdot poster actually bothering to read the link, and making a relevant comment and not relating it to some other slashdot hot-topic.
Not quite.
True, many companies are running at low efficiency, but that just means that they have to charge a lot more to hire all those extra people.
That extra cost goes into their prices, which drives up everyone else's costs.
I contracted for a year at a company that handled paychecks and benefits ivr (interactive voice response). The systems were incredibly inefficient, but they charged for each programmer hour back to the client.
We figured that if they designed their applications to not require a whole app for each client, they could get away from charging 2 months of programmer time per client.
But since they charged so much per hour (much more than the contracting companies received), we figured that this company would go bankrupt from efficiency. They actually made a huge profit from being inefficient.
If they redesigned their programming systems to be efficient, and charged a flat fee to each client, they wouldn't need as many seasonal programmers on staff. That would mean their clients would pay less as well, which would allow THEIR clients to charge less.
So yes, there might be less work, but prices might actually drop without causing deflation.
What we might actually have is a 20 hour work week, with less pay, but with more purchasing power.
If businesses ran at peak effeciency each business would probably need to hire fewer employees but there'd be room for a lot more businesses.
In this case I'll tell any of these companies that if they want someone to setup a system to store resumes effeciently then just give me a call. All I hear from this article is 'whiiiiiiiine'. Honestly, a hdd costs about $1 a gig (for the price I've been paying). An average plaintext resume is less than 10k (and you can easily convert non-plaintext resumes). If my quick math is right then that means you can store roughly 12 million resumes on a 120Gb hdd. All the software to do this task is opensource and thus free. A consultant to configure such a system (me) might cost $100 a day for about 5 business days to intergrate the system into your network. The system itself minus hdd would cost roughly $350.
$350 (system)
$120 (hdd)
$500 (support)
----
$970
So let's just say that setting up such a system would cost about a thousand dollars with a semi-annual additional cost of $100 in expected support. Hardly a killing blow to a business. Obviously for big businesses they can scale this system to increased needs just by adding more hdd space.
I handle more data collecting / indexing than this just as a hobby at home.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
A car is more efficient then walking...but notice how people took this great efficiency machine and managed to make their lives incredibly inefficient? Look at an aerial photo of a US town, about a third of the area is used by our great efficiency machine.
We burn up our efficiency at our jobs by buying bigger inefficient cars.
The music industry got fat by creating an extremely inefficient mechanism for recording and distributing music. We've essentially eliminated the need to pay the high distribution costs, so the RIAA is trying desparately to find other ways to make their industry inefficient. It was the inefficiencies that made it possible to charge people for music. It would be better for the people in the music industry to move on to something else.
We freed up all of those people from jobs in the manufacturing and production industries...so now we all work in the less inefficient service economy. Where do we go if we introduce efficiency in the service economy?
The fast food industry is over built, same with retail, apparel, hotels, tourism, etc..
People are not going to start having 20 work weeks. What will happen is that they will still be throwing in 60 hour weeks to survive, they will just be spinning their wheels on less profitable endeavors.
Finally, you can't say wages will go up because of efficiencies. For the most part, wages are commodities. High wages are the worst of all economic inefficiencies. Paying a CS major $30 a hour to do a job a high school drop out could do for $5 a hour is an inefficiency. Paying an American $20 an hour for a programming job that could be done in Pujab for $3 an hour is a serious waste of resources.
We are going to be in serious trouble if our economy cannot produce enough minimum wage paying jobs to keep people busy. Of course, the solution is to end minimum wage so that the economy can create subminimum wage jobs...but these jobs will most likely be in extremely unproductive areas of the economy.
So, let's do it! Now, can anyone publish the list of email from goverment job pages?
What exactly is the government doing that you would want to attack it? Frankly, I would rather see the government move SLOWLY on regulations, than FAST and make plenty more infringing mistakes, even if it means more spam in the short run.
On average, governments do piss-poor work. They do worse when you rush them.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
How to get a job in post Internet-Buble Era:
1) Send your resume to a big company to an e-mail that doesnt exists
2) They loose your resume (for sure)
3) You let them choose you to give a job or sue them
4)Profit
---
Its not that I am unemployed, I just have to much spare time in my hands...