Employers Trolling for Current Employee Resumes?

powderhound asks: "Recently, my employer started looking for new employees and started to find the resumes of current employees on the job Web sites. I've heard that management was not pleased. In the old days, before Web job sites, you could job hunt with relative certainty that your current employer would not find out until you gave notice. Now, any employer wishing to check on their employee's desire to find a new job need only sign up on the job Web sites and start trolling. How do we, as employees looking to change jobs, protect ourselves from possible discovery, and even worse, retribution? What have you done to protect yourself? Do you think employers are trolling job sites for their own employees?"

Comments

The Real Problem

[Medgur]

The real problem is that your employers didn't recognise their employee's discontent and ambition. Rather than opening a discussion to improve the quality of their employment they chose to become displeased. It's no wonder they're experiencing employee retention issues, they have an aggressive and hostile methodology in dealing with their employees.

Move on, move on.

Re:The Real Problem

[ivan256]

The real problem is actually that his management probably didn't consider that the people may just have their resumes out there to see what's going on... Testing the waters. It doesn't have to mean that they actually are actively seeking to leave. They got upset because they expect loyalty, so innocent explanations escaped them. It really would be best if managers realized that they were in a business relationship with their employees, and nothing more. Just keep that relationship mutually beneficial and you don't have to worry about your employees leaving.

Re:The Real Problem

[umbrellasd]

It really would be best if managers realized that they were in a business relationship with their employees, and nothing more. Just keep that relationship mutually beneficial and you don't have to worry about your employees leaving.

I see things somewhat differently. What I see in the industry is a definite trend toward companies caring much less about their employees. Employees are "resources" to be "utilized" in a "cost-effective" manner. The hypocrisy is that when an employee does the natural thing and protects themself by treating their employer in a similar fashion, employers get angry.

What they really want is the most cost-effective relationship possible. And that just may be slavery. There are laws against outright slavery, but "economic" slavery is not outlawed by any means. Most world economies thrive and require it.

So spend, spend, spend little consumerbots!

Use privacy options

[ghee22]

Careerbuilder, Dice.com, Monster.com all have privacy options. One I use goes is similar to this: "keep my resume searchable but hide my name, phone number, email address, and my current employer's name"

So how do future employers contact you? They use the contact job seeker option on the website, such as Dice.com, and Dice would then forward the email to you. It is then up to you unveil your identity when replying back to the employer.

What you can do to further your privacy is use a new email address that doesn't have your name in it to inquire more about the job opportunity.

Good luck!

Trolling?

[cammoblammo]

Umm, isn't the word 'trawling?'

Then again, I'd love to mod my employer down...

My boss

[Brandybuck]

My boss usually asks me where I'm sending my resume and if they have any management positions open...

Re:I never take mine down

[ottothecow]

Even if you do allow others to see it, it makes sense to simply never take it down (and always keep it up to date--so it is ready if you ever do need it). This way if your employer sees it, you can simply explain that your resume is always there (it will be there a week after you got your job and 3 years after you got your job) so it does not mean you are actively searching for a better opportunity. This could also serve to make them realize that they still have to compete with you on the labor market since your open resume could prompt a better offer even though you are not actively seeking it.

Of course, you can take all of that as a grain of salt because, while I do in fact have a resume, I'm just finishing my first year at the University of Chicago and nobody wants to give me a job anyway.

I was an HR Recruiter. WAS.

[NevarMore]

Last semester I interned at a computer consulting firm as a human resources recruiting assistant. The job was far from what I wanted to do, but I was in a specialzed political program and they felt that getting the CS major away from the keyboard would be more in line with that. I did learn a lot that I would not have learned if I were in a software development role, but I am certainly NOT an HR person. Bear with me, this is all very important for job seekers and does tie into the topic.

Anyway heres how it goes when a company doesn't do all/any of its own HR. They have a list, sometimes exclusive other times not, of HR/Consulting firms that they send job requests to. Those requests specify the length of the contract, the salary range, a brief (VERY) job description, and desired skills. It then became my bosses job to hand me that piece of paper from which I had to parse out a monster (we ONLY used monster for some reason) search string and start calling people.

First off we had an implied policy that we didn't bother with confidential resumes. Send an email and then leave it. Our response rate from those was exceedingly low, single-digit percentages.

We did have an easier time than many consulting contracting firms because nearly all of our contracts were temp-to-perm and my employer had farily good benefits. The way that works is a new hire was an employee of ours for 3 to 6 months, recieving pay and benefits from us while working for our client. At the end of that term, if the client was happy the client could then hire that employee on as thier own without paying us a finders fee. My employer got a (significant) cut, our clients got good people, and good people got full time, permanent jobs.

That sounds all well and good but human resources is not some place I can work and feel good about it. I had to look at a resume, review the stated skills in comparision to the desired skills, look at the employment history and see if/how those skills were actually used, and if that matched then I made a call (resumes with phone numbers get priority, because we can get you right away) and talked to the candidate to see if they were really interested.

Now I get to take a job description that was less than a paragraph with some notes/comments from my boss and tell (NEVER sell) the candidate about the position. Then if they were interested I had to ask questions and see if this person really had what we wanted for the job. It was hard because my boss (and by implication our clients) had very specific requriements, there was no room for 'I think this guy would be good' I had to take the vagaries of resumes and HR talk and salary requirements and quantify them. My coworkers (Hi Jeff, Julie, Lee, and Steve!) were great people and could handle that. It is very difficult.

Now coming back to the point, when we saw a resume of on of our people. We DID NOT CARE. If anything it was a good guide, as I'm reading the first few parts of the resume "Oh wow this guy would be perfect....because he is already doing (job) for (client).". I usually printed those out and used them as examples to compare to other resumes.

If you are looking for something better and not serious about going to a new job, you are wasting my time and yours. If you are "seeing whats out there" then you are a liability, it looks bad for us when an employee quits in the middle of a contract, it wastes my time, it wastes our clients time, and it shows an apalling lack of responsibility on your part. We were not hiring short-term contractors who were looking for adventure and new jobs every 3 months, we were looking for reliable, competent, full-time, well paid, permanent employees. If you want to see whats out there tell us when we call, we'll tell you what is out there, but we have other shit to do. Don't sit there chatting us up.

If you honestly are looking for a new job then I offer you the following advice. If you have an itemized list of skills, programming languages, apps etc. on your resume you need to be able to te