Job Seeker Information

The security breach at a major online job board last year may have made you a little hesitant to put your resume into online databases for fear that your contact information will be used for money-making purposes such as direct mail or email marketing or even identity theft. However, there are security measures you can take that will make your search for internet jobs more secure.

There’s always the option of just not putting your resume on the Internet at all, but that’s going to saddle you with a pretty large disadvantage in that recruiters that use the internet to find candidates won’t be able to find you!  Instead, you will have to proactively monitor many different job boards, looking for companies that are looking for you.  It’s a lot easier to find candidates for a recruiter when they can search through online databases looking for skill sets that match yours and contacting you about unadvertised job openings.  If the case is that you want to be easy to find, you’ll have to post your resume, so how can you do that and ensure that the boards you post to are legitimate and have precautions in place to ensure the safety of your information?

Always make sure that you feel confident before you post a resume to a internet jobs website.  Read their privacy policy carefully, primarily to figure out where they may repost your resume, or who they may sell it to.  If they do redistribute it to other sites, do you trust those sites, as well?  The best way to get answers to these kinds of questions is to email or call the board directly.  You can even log in as an employer and research all their policies on resume searching.  These boards want your resume- it’s a large part of how they make money- so any one that’s any good will accommodate your requests without a problem.

Once you’ve decided which board(s) you trust enough to post your resume to, take proper precautions when applying to jobs and responding to email solicitations. Job boards work hard to ensure that only legitimate jobs are posted, however, it’s near impossible to catch every single one of those “spam” job postings that may get through the filters. What this means to you is that you must keep an eye out for fishy jobs and emails. The old adage is truer than ever on the Internet- if something is too good to be true, it probably is. Never, ever give out your social security number or bank account information. An employer should never ask for that information via email, and a job board will not ever ask you for that information either, as is stated in most of their Privacy Policies.

If you do get a scam or “phishing” type of email and are able to deduce from what job board the sender got your information, it’s in everyone’s best interest for you to let the job board know as soon as possible, and give them as much information about said scam and the person who contacted you as possible.  You can also report fraudulent looking job postings.  The more aware the job boards are of potential rip-offs, the better job they can do to prevent them in the future.

By knowing what internet jobs sites ere your resume is posted on, doing your due diligence in regards to security measures and keeping an eye out for fraud, you can help keep yourself and your personal information safe while conducting an online job search.

Tags: careers, go job, GO Jobs.com, gojobs.com, internet jobs, job, job listings, job search, jobs

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Job Seeker Tips, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.