I hate having public profiles…

Lets face it looking for a job these days is pretty sucky.

Gone are the days when you sent your resume to an actual company after reading an ad in the paper. Now you’re directed to some web site where your profile is suddenly visible to the world.

Even if you try to maintain some small amount of privacy by minimizing the number of job web sites you visit, or job site accounts you’re still exposing all kinds of information.

Literally within one hour of my making a profile on a well known job search site, I’ve been receiving strange emails.

Most of which ask for this kind of information.

First and the last name                                   : < They Already Have this – They saw it on my resume
Email ID                                                          : < They Already Have this – Its on my resume and they contacted me via email
Phone/Mobile number                                     : < They Already Have this – They saw it on my resume
Willingness to relocate (Y/N)                           : < Reasonable
Availability for F2F Interview/ Phone Interview: < Obviously anytime
Availability to start                                            : < Reasonable
Current Location                                               : < They Already Have this – This is on my resume
Work status                                                      : < I’m guessing they’re asking if I need an H1B1 visa 
Expected Hourly rate                                       : < What are they paying?

And yet most of these silly headhunters ask for all of this AGAIN!

They have the ability to download and have no doubt seen my resume. But for some reason they want to wast everyone’s time by engaging in busy work.

Here’s a another one.

Full name:
Work Authorization status:
Current location:
Contact Number:
Best time to reach you on weekdays:
Rate $/hr on W2 (Without benefits):
Onsite availability:
Willing to Relocate:
Preferred location to work: MS OR AL

This one is funny because he claims the position is in California but is still asking me where I prefer to work, Is that Mississippi, Oregon, Alabama? Or is he asking if I want to work in Mississippi OR Alabama?

Yet there’ve been absolutely no responses from the actual positions that I applied for, other than the perfunctory confirmation emails saying, “we got your email”.

The problem is this.

If you want to participate, you have to give up any illusion of privacy. You know beyond a shadow of a doubt that virtually all the information that a bad guy could want is going to be available either because someone got careless or that they looked legitimate and you actually gave them the keys to steal your identity.

Talk about a rock and a hard place!

Over the past four years, I’ve tried faxing my information to headhunters and / or corporations in response to their ads. I’ve received to date no response to any of those inquiries. In fact, attempting to followup on those resumes or applications has resulted in one run-around after another because HR departments are so focused on using an on-line system, they never think to look at actual paper.

I’m under no illusion, that anything I fax to a corporation ever hits paper. The fax is converted directly to an OCR’d version of the document, codified, modified and distributed to various databases.

Which leads me to sending something via mail.

I’ve considered going really OLD SCHOOL because the paper would be handled, is a pain in the ass, and might actually be noticed while it was being scanned into the corporate databases. The fear is that if stuff is too much of a pain in the ass, that my resume will simply end up in the shredder without being scanned or handled at all.

So that leads back to exposing information that really should be private to the freakin world.

This is one of those times when I really miss the old days.

I’d get a phone call asking me to come in for an interview, meet the hiring manager, have a conversation,  then depending on that interview I’d go to the next stage. 

Sigh.