Gone are the days of grabbing the local paper and circling jobs in the classifieds section. In the internet age, the majority of job postings are online. It's not just postings either, nearly the entire recruitment process happens at the command of a keystroke. Remote working has become more common, as the internet has opened up opportunities to work from anywhere in the world.

No longer do you head to your local job center, meet the hiring manager, and hand them a paper resume. Simply, the internet has changed everything. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's better.

Here's why the recruitment sector's lax security, invasion of privacy, and lack of transparency could harm you in the long run.

Recruitment Security Soup

In our regular lives we wouldn't walk up to a total stranger and recount our entire employment history, address, and interests. However, it's what we are expected to do when it comes to online job searches. Instead of developing a relationship with your local recruitment manager, you are cajoled into sharing confidential and personal information on a recruitment website. In the modern employment marketplace, you have to go to where the jobs are, and because the market is fragmented there is no one central data repository.

job hunt harm privacy
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Job hunting is understandably stressful, and leads to you signing up to a handful of different recruitment websites in order make your applications. This dispersal of personal data is extremely helpful during your job search. However, once you are happily employed it's likely to be forgotten. Unlike a username and password which should be unique to each site, your resume and employment history is fixed across every site. If a breach were to happen then that information would be freely available and unchangeable.

Arguably you could level these same criticisms at the majority of websites that handle your data. You don't have to look far for demonstrations of corporate disregard for security practices. Equifax, OneLogin, and the WannaCry epidemic are just a few recent examples. Given the often overwhelming volume of security breaches, it can be tempting to turn to apathy and give into security fatigue. However, recruitment websites hold data that is more personal and confidential than many others. If any of the sites you had entrusted your address, employment history, and social security numbers to suffer a breach, the fix isn't as straightforward as changing a password.

The Resume Runaround

In days gone by, your resume was the way to land yourself a job. These days it is still important, even if it is supplemented by your recruitment website profiles. Although employers reportedly only spend six seconds glancing at your well-crafted resume, it allows you to put across your personality, priorities, and skills in a way that text boxes on a form don't allow. Your resume is your professional highlights reel, giving focus to what you want to project to a specific set of potential employers.

job hunt harm privacy
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One way to stand out in a crowded and competitive marketplace is to create a tailored resume for each job opportunity. Privacy in our personal lives allows us to vent, joke, and open up to specific groups or individuals without compromising or changing our other relationships. The rationale for a tailored resume is the similar. It allows us to present a version of ourselves that suits a particular opportunity. Given the complex and personal nature of a resume, it's a document that we -- rightly -- guard and take care of.

Of course, in the midst of applying for jobs, protecting your resume isn't likely to be a high priority. The goal of job hunting is to get your resume in front of as many hiring managers as possible, and even in the digital age that hasn't changed. Once a physical paper copy of your resume has outlived its usefulness, it finds a home in the shredder or trash can. However, the internet never forgets. Online resumes have the unintended consequence of leaving a digital trail.

One that may affect your chances of finding yourself a job in the future.

The Privacy Predicament

If you wanted to purge the internet of your out of date resumes you will run into a problem -- you have no idea where they are. Many of the websites offer employers or recruitment consultants access to a resume search. This allows them to filter candidates and download resumes for reference later. This feature is a double-edged sword -- it allows your resume to be seen by more employers but removes all transparency on where your data is going. A major concern here is recruitment consultants, many of whom offer resume search services for their own clients. This means your resume could end up three or four levels away from the original recruitment website, and without any means to trace its journey.

However, your resume is only one part of the privacy puzzle. It is in the site's best interest to persuade you to share as much of your personal information as possible. Completing your profile provides the site with data, but you are in control of how much you feel comfortable disclosing. A closer look at the way each site operates though shows how opaque the world of online data collection really is, and it starts as soon as you decide to sign up.

Lack of Control

To make signup easier, many recruitment websites have social login buttons displayed on the signup page. Social logins allow you to bypass the process of creating a new username and password. Instead, you authorize the website to login with Facebook, Google, or Twitter and your account is ready to go. The social networks don't provide this service out of the goodness of their hearts, so expect there to be some form of tracking. Before you make the decision to save a few seconds, take a look at the site's Privacy Policy. These are usually tedious documents but contain a lot of important information on how your data is used. If having to create a new password frustrates you, then you could generate a secure one with a password manager.

Lurking in Shadows

The Privacy Policy will also outline how your data is shared between third parties. In most cases this means advertisers, but it could also be with social networks. Many Privacy Policies are purposefully vague on who they share the data with. This is partly to prevent you being put off, but also to allow them scope to expand their data collection in the future. In line with many online businesses, recruitment websites typically gather your data to sell to advertisers. Advertisement data sharing is particularly problematic as advertisers usually hold shadow profiles of you. The shadow profile contains information they think is accurate and could include your interests, people you may know, and even your sexual orientation.

job hunt harm privacy
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If only it was just advertisers that create shadow profiles. However, the well known recruitment website Monster states in its Privacy Policy that they "may collect information about you from publicly-available websites. [They] may use this information to create a profile, even if you do not have an account with [them], or append it to an existing profile." Shadow profiles are an issue because they make inferences on you without your consent, knowledge, or ability to modify them. The recruitment industry is known to suffer the ill-effects of discrimination, and shadow profiles only compound the problem. What's worse, shadow profiles aren't necessarily accurate, but may be used to make decisions relating to your future employment.

Networking With Added Social

Recruiters and hiring managers learnt pretty fast how to exploit our collective addiction to oversharing online. Having a quick Google for a candidate and poking around in their Facebook profile has become another metric to judge their suitability for the job. The practice is so commonplace that you need to clean up your social media profiles before applying for a job. Some employers have even attempted to force candidates to hand over their social networking passwords. Fortunately, this is generally considered to be on the wrong side of the law.

Even more concerning is that large social networks are attempting to muscle in on the recruitment space. The most successful is LinkedIn, which has become a major staple of professional networking and job hunting. LinkedIn was hacked in 2012, and has always had a spotty history of protecting your privacy. It was acquired in 2016 by Microsoft, who themselves are unlikely to be granted goodwill for their surreptitious data collection. Keen not to be outdone, Facebook added a jobs search engine to their already bloated social network. Not to be left out, Google launched their own Google for Jobs only a few months later.

job hunt harm privacy
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Business Insider recently reported that Facebook may allow users to upload their resume, putting them in direct competition with LinkedIn. Given Facebook's less-than-stellar track record on privacy, this move to blend personal and professional is a cause of concern. That's not to say that all these tools don't have value when searching for your next job. After all, networking is integral to the job hunting process. However, with recruitment companies and social networks aping for each other's business, expect to see your privacy erode even further as the boundaries between your personal and professional lives continue to blur.

Who Can You Trust?

In virtually all online activities we make some level of compromise. As the saying goes: if it's free, then you are the product. This is true across social networking and increasingly in the recruitment industry. In return for dramatically increasing the employment opportunities available to you for free, the websites will turn your data to their advantage. Whether you view this as a fair trade will likely be dependent on your own circumstances. However, it seems unlikely many of us would willingly miss out on the perfect job due to these concerns.

That doesn't mean that there isn't value to be gained from knowing what happens to your data. Using unique passwords on each website may protect you when the next major breach happens. If you find a particularly disagreeable Privacy Policy, simply take your data elsewhere. You likely won't miss out as recruiters often post positions to multiple websites. If all of this has given you pause for thought, then maybe you'd consider a different approach. After all, when it comes to job hunting, your success may ultimately be down to who you know.

Have you used online recruitment agencies? What has been your experience? Do you think they should be doing more to protect your privacy and security? Let us know in the comments!

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