2011 - Year of the free resume

Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 10:00am Sunday 16 January 2011

It's only 2 weeks into the New Year, and it comes as no surprise to anyone who works in the online recruitment industry that the lack of security around resumes allows anyone with basic boolean knowledge to find resumes. Wouldn't it be great if one of your competitors has all their candidate resumes online?

You would have to tear up your RCSA/ITCRA membership up as you no longer follow the associations code of ethics, but is this really your problem? Let's think about this more...

Part of a recruiter's job is to find people. In fact, Recruiters are trained to use boolean search strings to find candidates/resumes. Basic strings like "filetype:doc resume" will immediately return results.

Recruitment Agencies store data online. Most recruitment systems are safe and secure. But there will always be the small % of insecure systems. You can't blame anyone else but yourself for not checking the security of your system. Never assume someone will tell you they can access your data.

The fact that the files are already indexed in a search engine makes it easier for anyone to find and harder to remove. This problem intensifies the more your website increases its SEO.

I declare 2011, the Year of the Free Resume.