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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."
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.'
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 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
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
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.
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
"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
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
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).
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
1) mass mail resume
2)*ring* 'what's that? you need more disk space? you don't say...'
Microsoft, violating federal law? I'm shocked!
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
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.
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.
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
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!
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."
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
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)"
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.
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.
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?
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!