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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.
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.
- 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
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,
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.
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
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.
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.
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!)
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?