[Discuss] Multiple submissions of resume by recruiters and hired.com

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

The resume-control issue's mostly been talked about from all angles, but I'll
add one: since LinkedIn has become dominant in so many career fields, it's
essential to manage your LinkedIn profile carefully.  When that company first
started out, I kept getting spammed through it by recruiters who had obtained
my email address elsewhere.  So I caved on this and registered a profile that
said, in essence, "Contact me offline, I'm not actually a LinkedIn user". 
That way I could control not only the emails but also my online reputation
(for example, registering my personal brand so I am now and probably always
will be linkedin.com/instantlinux, and no one else could masquerade as me).

Managing your LinkedIn (and other) online presence also means not giving out
too much.  Tempting as it may be to post all your resume details there, don't.
 Recruiters will harvest your profile and quadruple-submit you, which means
you'll never get an actual interview.  Just put in one or two
buzzword-compliant lines of description there about the last couple of jobs,
and invite people to contact you (regardless of whether you're looking: you
can always decline overtures but if you have a don't-contact-me status, then
your current employer is likely to notice if you change that status in the
future right when you don't want your job-search efforts to be noticed).

If you're unemployed, it's obviously tempting to go all-out with a fancy
LinkedIn profile.  But it's also much harder to get the interviews you want,
if you're not perceived as someone who needs to be wooed away from an existing
employer.  So the multiple-submission problem affects you more than others,
because your future-employer options are narrower.  So:  control your online
presence carefully, and watch out for resume-harvesting contingency
recruiters.  They aren't working for you, but they can be useful even when
they're exploiting you so treat them nicely all the same.

-rich