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 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.
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.
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.
So, if you never make it to "candidate" status, you have less of a leg to stand on legally. To me, that will lead to some dork intentionally avoiding giving "candidate" status to some minorities. Since they don't have to save the resumes for non-candidates, they don't have to face the evidence in a discrimination lawsuit. That can't be the result you were looking for.
Yeah, the law makes things messy. But, suck as it may, the best way to prove that you weren't being racist in your hiring *is* to save all your applications, even Johnny Dropout's.
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.