Resume Databases Pose Security Risks
ERE published a nice article yesterday about our recent re-launch.
They did a great job in summarizing some of the most important reasons behind the re-launch, including the minimalistic look-and-feel that should make it much easier for candidates to find the job postings that are the primary reason they come to a job board like CollegeRecruiter.com and that we're no longer selling resume searching access to employers.
As indicated in the ERE article, we came to the conclusion recently that the juice simply wasn't worth the squeeze when it came to selling resume searching. Many and perhaps most larger job boards generate 30 or so percent of their revenues from resume searching. Because of the strength of our targeted email and cell phone text messaging (SMS) products, resume searching was under five percent for us. We sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of it last year but expect most of those dollars to find their way into job postings, targeted emails, cell phone text messaging, or some of our other products. So we felt we weren't looking at a huge hit to revenue yet inevitably were looking at a potential huge hit to the security of the database.
There are two primary risks faced by candidates using job board that sell resume searching access:
- Illegitimate organizations get access and then download sometimes thousands of resumes for the purpose of stealing the identities of the candidates. There's an incredible amount of very private information in most resumes and an amazing amount of candidates include information such as birth date and social security number even though employers have absolutely no need to see that information until later in the hiring process. This is the risk that everyone seems to focus on but I actually feel that it is the lesser of the two.
- The risk that I think will cause many more job boards to follow in our footsteps is the rapidly increasing number of legitimate organizations who pay for resume searching access but then use the data for illegitimate purposes. For example, a small but growing number of financial services organizations are purchasing access to resume banks to help them identify potential clients. They'll look for people who are likely making a lot of money or who are entering professions where they are likely to make a lot of money and the organizations will then call those people to try to get them to buy products or services. How annoying. What job seeker would want to receive a call to buy shares in some penny stock company because they posted a resume at some job board? And if the job seeker figures out where the call came from, what damage will that job seeker do to the brand of the job board? Remember, this is the age of blogs, text messaging, Twitter, and YouTube. Word gets around very, very quickly.
By eliminating resume searching, we're going to make it a bit more difficult for our employer clients to connect with the candidates using our site. We'll likely lose a bit of revenue. But we'll be protecting the candidates and our brand. Which job boards will agree and make the same gutsy move? It will be interesting to see.
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