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."

Comments

Is this article just FUD?

[dtolton]

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?

Ummm...

[FroMan]

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?