Ask HN: Is this recruitment tactic shady?

9 points by mercury_craze 10 years ago | 6 comments

A couple of years ago I was about to become redundant and blanket uploaded my CV onto a number of job boards, including Monster.co.uk.

I quickly found a role by applying to a company directly and set my account on a number of CV sites (including Monster) to private. This is the current state of my profile. All other profiles I have across job sites have either been removed or disabled in this way.

Fast forward 2 years and I received an email today from a recruiter with the stock "your CV out of date, I am keen to talk to you" blurb. Usually this would go straight in the bin, I get about 10 of these a week so this isn't anything new.

This email however was part of a chain, and the recruiter had accidentally (I assume) forwarded me an email from a company called Logic Melon with a header saying:

You requested the details for <MY NAME> (from Monster). The C.V. should be attached as it was downloaded. Please find the details below.

Underneath this were details of my email address, mobile phone number, current location and date the profile was last updated.

What it looks like is that a recruiter has paid a third party service to retrieve my CV it scraped from Monster in 2014 and get my contact details. Contact details that shouldn't exist in the open.

I'm already fairly prejudiced about software recruitment firms from numerous run-ins with them in the past, so my natural response is to feel this is pretty shady behavior but should I be feeling so uncomfortable about this?

I understand that placing my personal details on a job board would have resulted in everyone and their mother being able to read and save it, but I didn't really think that my CV and personal contact details would have been archived and continued to be used by recruiters long after I disabled my account. I disabled my account as an indication that I was no longer looking for work, contacting me in this way is fairly blatantly ignoring this preference.

dudul 10 years ago |

> What it looks like is that a recruiter has paid a third party service to retrieve my CV it scraped from Monster in 2014 and get my contact details. Contact details that shouldn't exist in the open.

In 2014 your profile was public, so your contact information did exist in the open. May not be legal for a company to crawl Monster to store information though, you would have to look at Monster's terms of service (for example LinkedIn doesn't allow apps to store LinkedIn data, only to retrieve them via the API).

>I understand that placing my personal details on a job board would have resulted in everyone and their mother being able to read and save it, but I didn't really think that my CV and personal contact details would have been archived and continued to be used by recruiters long after I disabled my account.

Everything you put on the Internet is available to everybody until the end of times. Internalize that and you'll be fine :)

> I disabled my account as an indication that I was no longer looking for work, contacting me in this way is fairly blatantly ignoring this preference.

Recruiters don't give a damn about your preferences. Just blacklist this guy.

J-dawg 10 years ago |

This is interesting, and has made me think about the recruiters that contact me.

Early in my career I thought I wanted to be a project manager, so I tailored my CV to junior project manager jobs and uploaded it to several job sites. I haven't really used job boards since then.

Now, several years later, I am regularly emailed by recruiters about senior PM / programme manager jobs. I've never understood why, since I've never indicated any interest in this type of job.

It's almost as if they have obtained an old CV and extrapolated to the type of jobs they think I would be interested now, years later.

I'm possibly being paranoid, but your story made me think!

dozzie 10 years ago |

For me it's totally understandable that you dislike what the recruiter did. He (she?) was trying to sell you (with all the details you posted on the job board) as a candidate. Without your consent or even knowledge.

This is why we have laws about personally identifiable information in EU.

anon987 10 years ago |

Scraping and saving resumes is a common tactic. I know recruiters from Companies You've Heard Of and even their big, well known company scrapes daily.

As for selling the information later, that's a different issue (and one that I agree is not ethical).

DanBC 10 years ago |

Report it.

https://ico.org.uk/

Gustomaximus 10 years ago | |

Please do, I really dislike these shady companies. The only way to stop them is to have them reported.

On a side note when I'm contacted like this, typically from people trying to sell B2B services sometimes I amuse myself by replying "I'll talk if you tell me where you got my email". They never say. I also leave customised emails to a catch-all domain for some sites and occasionally see these data leaks but it is surprisingly rare.