Boing Boing reader I'm Skeered says,
I don't have a link exactly, but instead this email that I received today from the career services dept. at Columbia University. It's pretty scary. The Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) office is requiring Monster.com (which provides online resume/job search services for our career office at Columbia) to keep all copies of the resumes that we submit to Monster.com. From the letter attached below, it appears that this applies not only to Monster.com but to ALL online job listing companies. It doesn't provide any explanation for why our resumes (and hence our personal job/life history) is being recorded.
Here's a copy of the email:
From: careereducation@columbia.edu
Subject: IMPORTANT INTERVIEWTRAK CHANGE
Date: February 6, 2006 3:48:31 PM EST
To: undisclosed-recipients:;Dear Students,
We are writing to inform you of an important change to InterviewTRAK. Due to new federal legislation requiring MonsterTRAK, and all online job listing companies, to record a "snapshot" of a candidate's resume once it has been submitted, you can no longer update, replace or delete your resume once it has been submitted it to an InterviewTRAK event.
If you have updated or replaced your resume prior to February 6, 2006, the employer received the correct submission and you do not need to act.
However, after Monday, February 6, 2006, please be very careful when submitting resumes to InterviewTRAK events, because once you have submitted a resume to an event, you will no longer be able to update, replace, delete or remove a resume and therefore will not be able to alter or delete the resume submitted for that event. If you have any questions or need technical assistance, please email student.monstertrak@monster.com.
If you would like more information on this new ruling by The Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), please visit MonsterTRAK's OFCCP site at [Link]
Thank you for your cooperation.
Looks like this explains the record-keeping: Link. Has to do with a ruling issued in October, 2005 by the Department of Labor Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). The ruling went into effect today.
Reader comment: Geoff says,
Here's a presentation developed by the DOL on "The New Internet Applicant Recordkeeping Rule". Link
Reader comment: Not a BFD, says Sean Fitzpatrick:
This is why applicant data is tracked for contractors with the government. Not a big deal, really:
The OFCCP is tasked with the responsibility of making sure that federal contractors demonstrate fair hiring practices with respect to race, gender and ethnicity. To help ascertain and measure "fairness," the OFCCP has defined a set of strict data collection and reporting guidelines. The definition of an Internet Applicant was developed to help companies limit the amount of data that they need to collect and report on. Only those candidates who meet the strict definition of an "Internet Applicant" are required to be included in an Adverse Impact Analysis which is submitted to the government in the event of an audit.
explanatory PDF Link
Update: Monster.com's response is here.
