Resume Privacy
(August 24, 2007)
Resumes contain pretty important information. In much of the rest of the
world, the regulations covering ownership and distribution of the
information in a cv or resume is very tightly controlled. Making sense
of the maze of strong protections that vary from country to country is
the barrier to entry for global Applicant Tracking companies.
The cultural view seems to align with the
local legal views.
So, while the recent theft of 1.6
million resumes from Monster got limited news visibility here in the
States, it was a big story elsewhere. One more example of the cavalier
Yanks fussing about security in one breath and dismissing it in another.
Of
22 news articles caught by Google on the subject, 60% were
international.
Cheezhead is doing his usual Paul Revere
routine,
alerting the common folk to the crisis.
The question of privacy and resume
management is a huge issue. Routinely, millions of resumes change hands
in unregulated spot markets. As the number of job boards continues its
radical multiplication, one can only imagine that the level of security
declines with the average size of a job board. Now that we have 60,000
of them, the horse may well be out of the barn.
Pam Dixon has been trying to get
attention for this issue for many years. In 2003, she authored a report
about the
treatment of resumes as commodity data for the
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
Needless to say, it fell on deaf ears. (also see her
Resume Database Nightmare: Job Seeker Privacy at Risk)
Bashing Monster after they've been
vandalized is a bit of victim blaming. This looks more like an emergency
issue for the IAEWS. If
the International Association of Employment Websites isn't the place for
standardization of privacy protection for Job Hunters, where do you
suppose it is.
The entire job American job board
industry is in a sleep of complacency. The members of Gen Y, already
cynical about corporate treatment of individual rights will simply have
their fears confirmed by this incident. It tars the whole industry, not
just the victim.
Job boards should be trusted holders of
private personal information. The problem has come during cash flow
crunches. Great designs for privacy that are not legally required seem
to dissipate in the face of a downturn. Privacy agreements can be
legally revised with a simple spam notification.
The issues are cultural. But the change
will be generational. Learning to treat resumes with adequate levels of
security concern will involve efforts on both sides of the equation.
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