A Just A Sec Exclusive!
When you post your resume on well-know job sites, you may or may not get a job – but you’ll definitely get spammed.
We noticed after we posted our resumes on job sites, we’d get in-boxes full of spam. And some of the dumbest spam we’ve ever seen, too.
Were the job sites really the source of our spam? And if so, which sites? Who was the worst spammer? We decided to get an answer.
We set up a fake resume for a secretary named “Justine” on Monster, Hot Jobs and Career Builder. We made Justine a secretary with very little experience, and we littered her resume with typos. In other words, she wasn’t likely to attract many legitimate job offers. We also set up three separate e-mail accounts corresponding with the three sites, and monitored them for two weeks.
Here’s what we learned.
Career Builder: The MOST Spam.
We received 6 different items of pure spam within two weeks. The first spam e-mail arrived within 24 hours of posting Justine’s resume.
Our favorite:
- From “Roger Smith”: “I am the Chief Executive Officer of National Income Life. I recently found your resume online and wanted to get in touch with you. We are expanding our sales force…we believe you have the potential to be an excellent match.”
Me? Justine?! You wanted to get in touch with lil’ ol’ ME? And…and you believe in my potential? Shucks, I oughta misspell secrtary and unvistity on every resume I post! Who knew I was such a hot property?
Oh, and there was this one:
“GREETINGS, I AM SSG LAPEINE WITH THE US ARMY…We are currently searching for people to fill over 150 different career field IN THE ARMY. You must be willing to join the United States Army to get one of these career field.”
Considering who our president is, we’re not surprised by the atrocious grammar. But wow, you should see the list of exciting careers you can train for in the army! Just one question: does your health insurance kick in before or after you get your head blown off in Baghdad?
Hot Jobs: The FASTEST Spam.
Hot Jobs comes in a close second for the most spam, with 5 items within two weeks. However, they had the fastest delivery. We got our first spam e-mail within just 12 hours of posting Justine’s resume.
Our favorites:
- Subject line “An Electrician Apprentice job is now open.”
- Subject line “Interested in working as an Architect?”
Justine has no job experience or education that would indicate she’d be even remotely interested in these careers. Sure, it’s possible she harbors some secret desire to be an architect with an electrical background, but chances are these e-mails are just going to be annoyances for most people.
Monster: The Least & Slowest Spam.
Monster delivered 2 items of spam within two weeks. And they took four days to send us the first one. But still – they spammed us.
Our favorite:
From “Sabrina Lloyd”: “…I am a State Director for National Income Life. I saw your resume on the internet and felt that I should contact you immediately. Our company currently has openings for several outstanding individuals like you.”
Individuals like me, Justine? The incompetent secretary with next-to-zero experience and the lowest grade point average one can have and still graduate from community college? I am so hot, I’m sizzlin’!
If we monitored the e-mail accounts longer, we’d probably see the amount of spam multiply, as the spammers sold our e-mail addresses to still more spammers.
The lesson here? If you’re going to post your resume on a job site, set up a free e-mail account somewhere and use it only for responses from that site. It’ll still be a pain to browse through all the junk mail for any legitimate inquiries, but at least you’ll keep the spam out of any existing e-mail accounts you care about.
And maybe you can send a complaint letter to Monster, Hot Jobs or Career Builder and tell them what you think about them passing your e-mail address on to skeevy companies who treat you like a moron.
Maybe these will help:
Mr. Richard Castellini
Vice President of Consumer Marketing
CareerBuilder
200 N. LaSalle St
Suite 1100
Chicago, IL 60601
Main Number: (773) 527-3600
Toll Free: (800) 638-4212
Jerry Yang, CEO
Hot Jobs -- Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Tel: (408) 349-3300
Fax: (408) 349-3301
Mr. Sal Iannuzzi
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Monster Worldwide, Inc.
622 Third Avenue, 39th Floor
New York, NY 10017
Phone: (212) 351-7000
Fax: (646) 658-0541
(Note: We did not count e-mails from the job sites themselves as spam.)
