CollegeRecruiter.com Kills Resume Searching
One of the great improvements in the job board industry since it came into being in the mid-1990's was the creation by Peter Weddle of the International Association of Employment Web Sites (IAEWS). It was at last November's IAEWS meeting in Orlando that I realized, as one of the owners of CollegeRecruiter.com, that we needed to stop selling access to our resume bank.
One of the biggest concerns shared by representatives from 80 of the biggest boards was the increasing frequency of illegitimate individuals and organizations using resume banks for the purpose of identity theft. Sometimes these entities use legitimate credit cards but download the data for illegitimate reasons. More times than not they're using stolen credit cards. But in either case, they're hoping that the job boards give them access and don't cut it off until after they've downloaded thousands and sometimes tens or even hundreds of thousands of resumes. Fortunately, to the best of our knowledge, we've identified all of these threats and blocked them from accessing our resume bank.
Another concern and much harder to guard against are legitimate organizations that purchase access but use the data for illegitimate purposes. For example, some financial services companies are purchasing resume bank access to identify potential clients using the information in their resumes. The companies then contact those potential clients and pitch their products and service to them. If a brand name financial services company buys resume searching using a valid credit card, how is a job board to know that they're not looking at the resume in order to hire the candidates but instead to solicit their business? The answer is that realistically the boards have no way of knowing how the resume data is being used and therefore no way of protecting the candidates who post their resumes to those boards. Unless the boards stop selling resume searching access.
We're re-launching CollegeRecruiter.com this weekend. We'll have an all new look-and-feel (think Google) and all new job search and resume database software. And we'll no longer allow anyone to search our resume bank, legitimate or otherwise. We're not the first board to stop selling resume searching but we'll be far from the last.
Our decision was hard as many employers are primarily and sometimes only interested in purchasing resume searching. But we looked long and hard at the risks to our candidates of the identity theft and then coupled that with their annoyance from the solicitations. We then weighed those problems against the revenues that we'll likely lose from terminating the resume searching product and the decision ended up being easier than I would have anticipated. Will we lose some revenues? Absolutely. But will we end up with safer and happier candidates who will be more likely to tell their friends about CollegeRecruiter.com? Also absolutely.
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