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

What are we waiting for?!!

[levik]

Let's all apply for the newly opened CEO position at Microsoft!

Company looking for experienced developers...

[Lugor]

Send your resumes here: careers@microsoft.com.
Bulk mailers welcome.

Found this out last week

[Rorgg]

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?

Does Uncle Sam play too?

[Pilo]

I wonder if the government has to keep all the resumes that are sent to them from people wanting municipal jobs and the like

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?

Re:use /dev/null for storage

[tato (and tato only)]

I use /dev/urandom. Given sufficient time, I can retrieve any resume; from it.

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?

This is quite simply solved.

[John Penix]

1. Buy a 100 gig hard drive
2. Format it with random noise
3. Give the random noise a PGP header
4. 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.

Well then ...

[the bluebrain]

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?

Oh yes, it's very FUDdy.

[Nurlman]

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:

Any personnel or employment record made or kept by an employer (including but not necessarily limited to requests for reasonable accommodation, application forms submitted by applicants and other records having to do with hiring, promotion, demotion, transfer, lay-off or termination, rates of pay or other terms of compensation, and selection for training or apprenticeship) shall be preserved by the employer for a period of one year from the date of the making of the record or the personnel action involved, whichever occurs later.

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:

The Commission has not adopted any requirement, generally applicable to employers, that records be made or kept.

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.)