Maybe you’re not into New Year’s resolutions but if you are, one resolution you might consider is to clean up your resume footprint online.
Specifically, if you’ve posted your resume to numerous job boards, you should consider taking your resume off some or all of them off unless you’re actually looking for a new job.
Even if you are looking for a new job you need to keep track of what job boards you’re posting to. I’ve helped people find jobs and then 2 months later find that their resume is still posted on job boards. This doesn’t look good especially if your new employer sees your resume online and thinks that you’re searching for a new job again. I’ve seen that happen.
Often, people find a new job board and post their resume to it and then forget about it or forget their login details and don’t bother to visit the website again.
Your resume has value so protecting it and making it harder to find is actually preferable to plastering it all over the place and believing that quantity is better than quality. As many people – including some so-called career experts believe – job searching is “all about numbers” and the more places you post your resume the better which is pretty crazy and not true.
Job searching isn’t a numbers game, it’s about finding suitable roles that match your skills and career goals. If you’re applying to 50 different jobs a day or something like that, you’re probably applying to 45 of them that really don’t suit you.
To a recruiter and to hiring managers, the more times we see someone’s resume posted on job boards, the more we wonder why you can’t get a job. I’ve had cases where you keep running into the same person on the job boards and see different versions of the resume where the job title seems to change at the same job, dates don’t match up and stuff like that and immediately I start thinking that I’ve found someone who is lying on their resume and has simply forgotten they have numerous versions of their resume online. This happens quite frequently.
Then you get the people who post multiple resumes on one job board where several of the versions seem to be half completed and I conclude that this person isn’t very detail-oriented and don’t bother contacting them.
It’s pretty interesting how things like this can affect the way people consider you just from viewing your resume and/or your online habits even if you don’t realize it.
