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?
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?
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 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
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
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
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
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.
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).
Also, I cannot see the problem. My resume in msword format is 5k gziped (yes, about 60% of word documents are NULL characters, I've counted :) and that is why they compress so well). OK, if a typical resume is 5k in size and lets say that this small company that is hurting for cash gets 5,000 applicants for 100 positions a year. This would be a grand total of 2.4Gigs a year. A 20Gig hardisk costs $50, and that would hold almost 10 years worth of accumilated resumes.
If a company is hurting that bad for cash, I doubt they can hire anyone.
Because, some companies would look at resumes and guess about gender, ethnicity, age, creed, etc. and toss them without interviews. Or, the resume looks good, they have an interview, see the person (who wasn't the desired demographic) and then toss the resume (after saying, gee whiz, the position just got filled). Later on, when someone notes that the company is 99.999% white male, the company responds that the people hired were the best qualified or only applicants and there's no pesky resume file to check that against.
That's what was being addressed when those laws (and regulations) were placed on the books, probably during the 70s.
"Sadly, in the UK, there is a law specific to encrypted data that places the burden of proof on you. If you forget the key to some encrypted data that the government decides it wants to read, you can go to jail."
Marutukku or plain old destruction
Does anyone else find it worrying that a privacy system designed to withstand people being tortured is of most use in the UK?
This has interesting implications for the definition of the term "applicant".
At least in the US, nobody puts their race, gender or age[1] on their resumes. Does this mean that "applicant" is defined as "someone who has completed an application for employment", not simply "someone who sent email containing the words 'work experience' to careers@ourcompany.com"?
[1] Or "Health: excellent (mostly affected by the gym)"
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...
You don't? I do. htdig with gzip/zip and word doc reading addons does a great job of looking inside all sorts of files for me all the time, compressed or not.
Nice try FUD-master.
everything in moderation
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.
Even if companies do follow your suggestion, it is still costing them a lot of money to have to do it. It takes time to drag and drop. Not much, granted (and it would be less time if you didn't have to watch the cutesy papers flying across the progress dialog), but the more resumes they get, the more time they are spending doing the copying. I would guess it takes at least 3 times as long to do the copying as it does to just click the delete button.
The way I see it, the government is imposing a rather large financial burden on employers, just so the government can go have a look when they want to see if the employer is unfairly dicriminating against applicants.
This reminds me of the standard mortgage application. It has a box where you are required to indicate your race. Why should you have to indicate your race on a mortgage app? Only so the government can make sure the lender is not using that information. Not only is the lender required to collect information they aren't legally allowed to consider, the lender is required to guess the applicant's race if the applicant refuses to provide it.
Just another fine example of government stupidity.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
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?