A few days ago I posted on the subject of not posting your resume on every job board you can find.

Taking a step back, many people often wonder if they should even post their resume on an online job board(s) in the first place. Obviously at the end of the day it’s your choice but here are a few things to consider:

1. You can lose your ability to conduct a covert job search: If your resume is posted publicly so that anyone can search for it, anyone can therefore find it. How will you explain yourself if your boss or someone else in your current employer sees your resume on one of those job boards? It would cause a few question to arise I’m sure.

2. You’re going to get to know a lot of recruiters: Depending on the job board(s) you’re posting your resume to, you’ll probably find that many if not most of the people contacting you for jobs aren’t actual hiring managers but recruiters.

3. You’re probably competing with hundreds of other people: Every job that appears on the major job boards probably gets ready by hundreds (or more) other people so there’s your competition for often just 1 job. Obviously your odds at getting a job decrease as more people apply for it using the same method you do and it becomes more difficult to separate yourself from them.

How can you improve your odds of conducting a confidential job search and still get some value?

Depending on your profession, you might find that there are industry or job-specific job boards that might help to decrease the number of people applying for the same jobs you are but are also more focused to your interests too.

You can also consider either posting your resume as confidential and/or not posting your resume at all and simply setting up job agents (ie. saved searches) to alert you when a suitable job arises so that you maintain control of your resume rather than posting it publicly.

As a recruiter, it’s interesting these days how people don’t think twice about posting their resume on any job board that becomes available.

These days it’s easy enough as it is to have personal details available on the web through various social media websites but when it comes to your resume you really want to keep track of where you post it so you can take it down again when you’re no longer looking for a new job.

It also helps just to ensure that you don’t have all sorts of versions of your resume floating around because as soon as a hiring manager or recruiter sees a few different versions, they’re going to wonder which one is correct.

Perhaps these days posting a resume online isn’t as big a deal for most people as it used to be. It wasn’t too long ago that people hid job searches from their current employer and maybe even their work colleagues for fear of getting caught.

These days though it isn’t even a surprise to see people’s LinkedIn profile show “career opportunities” as one of the reasons they’d like to be contacted on the site so clearly times have changed.

Having said that, your resume has value so keep a tight rein on it and make sure you maintain some control over it before it starts flying around the Internet out of control and without your expressed permission.

When you email your resume to a major company and they inevitably don’t have a job that matches your skills and experience, you will probably get an automated email response that tells you that they will keep your resume on file for a period of 6 months. You hope that this means they are keeping a copy of your resume in case a suitable position arises. Afterall, that’s what they told you.

In actuality, they are keeping your resume on file so that when a recruiter sends them your resume for a particular job – hopefully with your permission – the HR staff can tell the recruiter that they already have your resume in their database and therefore won’t require the recruiter’s help. This means they won’t have to pay the recruiter but can still follow up with you for the job you applied for.

This is good for the company because they just got a recruiter to do their job for them and they didn’t even have to pay for the recruiter’s work. It also causes the recruiter to curse the resume Gods for ever creating online job boards.

The bad news is that the company may not actually contact you for the job because contacting you would be an admission that the HR staff in charge of searching the resume database don’t know what they are doing and chances are, they don’t. Or they’ll assume that since you are already in the company’s database and haven’t been hired, you must not be that good otherwise another HR staffer in the company would have interviewed you already.

Now, if you aren’t actually using a recruiter and have already submitted your resume to a company, don’t expect that a member of the HR staff will contact you regarding a suitable position because it would assume that the people who work in HR for that company know how to use a resume database.

They probably don’t.

If they did, all recruiters would be unemployed.

The good news is that in 6 months, your resume will be deleted and you can start the game all over again and resubmit your resume to the company for consideration. Or maybe your resume won’t be deleted because the 6 month thing is just something the company tells you to stop you from calling them over and over again asking about the status of your application and figures that after 6 months of not hearing from them, you’ll get the point.

The person who designed the resume database may have forgotten to actually write code to delete resumes after 6 months, too. Oops.