Choose the job sites you use very carefully!
If you aren’t careful, you risk a total loss of privacy as your resume and personal information becomes visible to anyone who comes across it, and/or your information can be sold to people who have products and services to sell you. And more than likely you will not get a job through those job sites either!
With hundreds if not thousands of job sites in existence these days, how do you determine the safe job sites from the identity/info stealing job sites? Read on to find out how…
4 Reasons to Be Careful in Selecting a Job Site:
1. Employers can, and do, fire employees who are “disloyal” (i.e., job searching), and, in most cases, that firing is perfectly legal where you live.
2. Your resume contains information that can impact your personal safety. If someone is interested in harming you, your resume with completed contact and employment information provides vital information for them.
3. Your resume contains information that would be very useful to someone stealing your identity. Identity theft is a major problem and is very difficult to clean up.
4. Your email inbox can get stuffed with “spam” (bulk unsolicited commercial email) from job sites that are using your job search as an excuse to collect information from you. So even if you don’t have a job to protect, you probably don’t want your email inbox filled with junk mail.
The best job sites are sites that offer either several methods for you to protect your resume or they don’t have an applicant/resume database (also known as a “resume bank”) at all. Since revenues from employer subscriptions to search such databases are a major source of income for most job sites, the majority of commercial sites offer the service. Be a savvy job seeker and evaluate a job site carefully before you trust it with your resume.
Evaluate the Job Site before You Register or Post a Resume/Profile
Does the site require you to register or fill our a form before showing you local job listings? If yes, LEAVE the site ASAP! A reputable job site WILL NOT require you to register or fill out forms asking for your personal information just to see job openings.
Does the site have a privacy policy posted?
Carefully read the job site’s privacy policy. And, don’t depend on a third party, like BBBOnline or TRUSTe to protect your privacy. Read the policy, yourself, if there is one!!
Privacy “RED FLAGS” — Don’t register if you see any of these rid flags. Go to another job search site.
The site does not have a privacy policy, at all, so you have no idea what happens to your private information.
The site has a privacy policy, but the policy indicates that the site freely sells or shares your “individually identifiably” private information.
Can you perform a job search for a specific job opening without registering your resume or profile?
The registration process involves you completing a form providing the job site with a means to contact you as well as, frequently, details about your employment history and education.
Many sites allow you to search through the job openings without registering your resume or profile first. Others want you to register before you can see their job postings, which is problematic if you don’t know that they have jobs appropriate for your needs.
Sites that allow you to search their jobs before asking you to register may want you want to register before allowing your to submit an application. At some sites, the job postings contain direct contact information for the employer or recruiter, allowing you to contact them directly without registration. Others want you to apply through the job site which requires some level of registration. Postpone registering as long as reasonably possible. Assuming that you have read the privacy policy and don’t have any issues with it, then register when you must, providing the bare minimum of information required (particularly your contact information).
Be cautious about registering before you are allowed to do a job search. It may not be worth it to you!
What kind of control do you have over access to your resume or profile?
The best job sites offer several methods for you to use, and you choose the one that fits your needs at the time:
The most control:
Potential employers see your resume only after you have decided that they have a job which interests you, and you authorize the job site to send your information to that specific employer, on a case-by-case basis. This means that potential employers cannot find your resume or profile in the job site’s resume database when they search through it for candidates.
Bottom line:
Best privacy protection; least visibility or marketing impact from your resume for your job search because employers can’t find it.
Good control:
Your resume is in the applicant/resume database, but access to your contact information (name, address, phone numbers, and e-mail) is blocked automatically by the job site until you authorize release to specific employers on a case-by-case basis. So, employers may find your resume when they search through the job site’s resume database, but your contact information will be missing so employers cannot identify you until you authorize the job site to release the information or contact them directly yourself.
Bottom line: Pretty good privacy protection; pretty good visibility and marketing because your resume may be found by employers searching for your skill set.
NOTES:
Job seekers frequently sabotage their own privacy by unknowingly copying the top of their resume (with all their contact information) into the body of the resume. So, while the job site blocks access to the contact information input into specific labeled fields, the job seeker accidentally reveals the information in the text block fields of the resume form. Be careful with the copy-and-paste process!
While you are restricting access to your contact information, you may want to consider disguising the employer name, title, and location of your current job, if you have one.
Some control:
Your resume with contact information visible is available to employers and/or agency recruiters searching through the resume database. However, you may block access to your resume for specific employers (your current company, for example).
Bottom line: As job protection, this may work, but it may not. Can you take the risk? Every employer with access to the resume database has access to your information, so it may be good personal marketing. However, as privacy protection, it fails!
No control:
The site requires you to give it all of your contact information, and then permits anyone (or any employer who pays a fee) to search through their applicant/resume database.
This is a high risk situation for you! Both your job and your privacy are completely unprotected. Anyone with access to the resume database has complete access to your most personal information.
Bottom line: Don’t use this kind of site if you can possibly avoid it!
What kind of access will you have to your resume after you post it?
At a minimum, you should be able to edit your resume whenever you feel it necessary (like every time you apply for a different job).
You should be able to delete your resume (or profile) from the applicant database whenever you want to get out of the job market, for whatever reason you decide.
Is there a set time-frame when your resume will be “active” after which it will be removed from the applicant database? Can you “renew” your resume if you want it to remain in the database after the normal expiration date? Is it easy to renew?
When you have landed your ideal job, don’t forget to go back to the sites where you registered, and delete your resume! You don’t want your new boss to find your resume “out there” someday.
Do you like the job search capability?
If you answer “NO” to the following questions then find another job search site.
Is the search capability easy for you to use?
The site’s search function was self-explanatory or intuitive for you to use, and there were hints or a help page for assistance if you needed any.
Are there enough options in selecting the search criteria so that you can finely tune your search?
Search criteria that are too general (all the job openings in Georgia, for example) usually have so many entries in the results that you can’t reasonably expect to read them all. You may only want to see restaurant jobs in Atlanta, Georgia, and the site’s search function should provide you with the proper tools to identify and deliver the job openings that you really want.
Are the results from the searches appropriate to your search criteria?
If you didn’t get the results you expected, you may not have understood how to do a search at that site, the job search function may not work well, or it may return results based on employers paying fees for visibility rather than your needs as a job seeker.
Don’t assume that you are stupid if you can’t get a search to work. Sometimes, the site is not designed or working properly. Maybe it’s just the wrong site for the opportunities that you want.
Does the site have the kind of jobs that interest you?
You won’t find many retail jobs on a site built for job openings for astronaut jobs, and vice versa, so do a little research to see what the site offers. Check the “About Us” (or what ever sounds similar) section of the site if the home page doesn’t give you enough clues. If all else fails, there should be a “Contact Us” link that will allow you to send e-mail directly to the site management chain (probably at the bottom).
Are the jobs in locations where you want to live and work?
Your evaluation of the site’s search function (above) should have revealed if your preferred geography is included in the posted jobs.
Were there more than 3 or 4 interesting or relevant responses to your searches?
If few job openings look relevant, you will probably be better off performing your job search at another site.
Are there dates associated with the job openings so that you can see which ones are the newest and which are the oldest?
Better, can you use the job posting date as one of your search criteria? An “old” opportunity isn’t necessarily a “bad” one, but if there are very few opportunities with recent dates, you may be at a site that is not very active or robust.
Check out the employers listed at the site.
Look for a listing of employers, or do a search with very few (or very broad) criteria to get the maximum number of results and then look at the employers listed.
Are these companies or organizations that interest you?
Are they real employers or are they employment agencies?
Why should you care if they are agencies? Isn’t that good?
Not necessarily good, for a couple of reasons:
First, ethically-challenged agency recruiters may take the resume that you submit for one employer’s job, and send that resume to other employers. Good agencies won’t do this, but not all agencies (or agency recruiters) are good.
Secondly, agencies charge employers a fee for each applicant placed. This raises the “cost-of-hire” of the agency candidate to the employer, over the cost of a candidate who goes directly to the employer. If a company is closely watching their budget and all other things being equal, often the choice will go to the less expensive candidate.
In many cases, employers don’t have the skilled people to fill their own openings or post them at job sites, and they “outsource” that task, so it’s not always a bad sign. Just pay attention.
Will they distribute your resume?
As a “benefit” to job seekers, some site offer to “cross-post” resumes at other other job sites. It’s best to decline the distribution offer, if you can, or choose another job site.
Some sites offer to “blast” your resume to thousands of recruiters and employers. Again, be very cautious. We don’t recommend this practice.
Where/how does the site get its job listings?
Many job sites such as ours get current job openings through our partnership with Indeed.com. By giving us access to over 3 million job listings we can take just a portion of their job listings that are geared to hourly workers and post them on our site.
Remember: MANY employment sites (not ours) want to have your resume in their database; you can be choosy about which sites you use.