Read This Before You Put a Resume Online

Cyberspace is a Job Jungle

By Jerry Useem

The headhunter probably should have contacted Unmesh Laddha before plucking his resume off an Internet job board and sending it, without his knowledge, to an employer. Especially because that employer, Argus Technical Services, was where Laddha already worked.

Last November, Laddha’s boss telephoned him in a huff, none too happy to have received the resume of his own employee. Initially dumbstruck Laddha was at pains to explain that he posted it online seven months earlier, before taking the job at Argus, and had never even met the headhunter in question. His job was spared, but his resume, still lingering in cyberspace, has twice more landed on his boss’ desk. "It’s been very embarrassing," says the 28-year-old technical consultant. "Once I put my resume on the Internet, I couldn’t do anything to control it."

Such is the mixed blessing of online job hunting. Sites like Monster.com, Headhunter.net, and HotJobs.com allow candidates to shop their resumes to hundreds of employers at once. But many resumes-- purloined by unscrupulous headhunters, duplicated and reposted by roving "spiders," and even spotted online by Web-wise bosses--are getting more visibility than their authors intended. "I get a minimum of two messages a week from readers saying they’ve lost their job from posting on the Net," warns Pam Dixon, author of two books on Internet job searching. "It really is a very dangerous situation for the job seeker."

Hyperbole? It seems not. More than a dozen human resources managers contacted by Fortune reported stumbling across their employees’ resumes on the Net. Mike Prelewicz, recruiting manager at the Milwaukee office of Consultis Inc., says it has happened to him six times, usually while he’s sifting through candidates on Monster.com. "We call them on the carpet," says Prelewicz, describing his handling of the first offender: "I got him on the telephone and said, ‘What’s going on? Is there something you don’t like about us?

That was a more tempered response, he admits, than his initial instinct: firing the guy. "The Net is so vast, people think you’ll never bump into each other," says Prelewicz. "But it’s more common than people realize."

Not all such encounters are accidental. Some corporations have begun to patrol cyberspace in search of wayward workers, giving rise to a shadowy new subspecies of HR professional: the salvager."

As a senior human resources consultant at Seer Technologies, a computer-services firm in Cary, N.C., that has since been acquired, part of Lori Laubach’s job was to log on to resume boards each day, type in the company name, and see if any of Seer’s 700 employees popped up. If one did, Laubach would notify the employee’s supervisor. They would discuss whether the employee should be persuaded to stay or encouraged to leave, then arrange a sit-down with the invariably stunned individual. "At least 20 or 30" people were caught in such a fashion, says Laubach, who left the company last fall. "Probably more.... We relied very heavily on it."

It’s called employee "salvaging," and to some, the practice smacks of guard towers and searchlights, "I would be repulsed if someone did it here," says Allen Wolf, manager of recruiting programs and services at Ford Motor. "We don’t believe that’s fair to the employee." Donald Harris, chairman of the Privacy Committee of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management, calls such monitoring Orwellian and speculates that "it could create an employee- relations disaster."

But at stake, Laubach insists, was a legitimate employer concern: protection of company secrets. Employees discovered with one foot out the electronic door, she says, needed to be reassigned off sensitive projects. Other companies seem to share her philosophy. A former HR manager at software behemoth Computer Associates, Bruce Sasson, says two of his colleagues spent "a good part of their day" scanning the Web for current employees. (Computer Associates says it has no such policy.) And Pam Dixon, the author, says she’s confirmed at least seven instances of Fortune 1,000 companies assigning someone to the task full-time.

This article appeared in the May 10^th edition of Fortune Magazine.