Some companies even engage in the unethical practice of posting phony jobs just to obtain contact information of job seekers. Many companies leave a job posting up long after it has been filled - just to harvest the information more resumes will provide. Blaine reports that he never takes the time to change his resume for any one of the jobs he is applying for. He just puts as much as he can on his resume - including his home and cellular phone numbers, his entire employment history plus his academic records and sends it all whiling into the void of cyberspace without a thought or concern about what happens to it. Later, he wonders why telemarketers are calling on him on his cell phone.
Online resumes are electronic documents and they are easily transferred.
In early 1999, one over-zealous salesperson for a major Internet job board even took to cutting and pasting resumes off of personal web sites he found online and posting them on his company's site unbeknownst to job seekers. That practice ended when a job seeker received a call from a recruiter at his current place of employment and sued the job board. If a resume can float in cyberspace forever, it had better be truthful and sincerely reflect the objectives of the job seeker. And while the raging arguments over Internet privacy have intensified in the last year, most Internet job boards have thus far failed to identify the privacy concerns of job seekers. Therefore, a careful approach to resume submission should be employed.