I am looking for new jobs as a Cloud Engineer. Being privacy conscious makes the job hunt relatively hard. I don’t use LinkedIn. But most companies publish their openings on websites like this and almost all of them are a privacy nightmare.
As soon as you make an account on them, you are bombarded with thousands of emails and targeted ads. But if I made a temporary email for this purpose, I feel I might get blacklisted.
Honestly I feel kind of sad about today’s corporate field.
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Unfortunately, having a job is horrible for your privacy. You’re required to provide full personal details to be hired to an employer with dubious security who forces you to sign up for accounts with likely either Microsoft or Google. Depending on your position you either need to use your personal phone for work (and your work accounts are easily tied to your phone), or carry a work phone with you, which you have even less control over than normal.
That isn’t really helpful.
I think to your original question, it’s more about sanitizing what is published. On LinkedIn and Indeed. Whenever possible apply directly through the website. But everywhere is going to require similar levels of personal information. As far as being worried about spam; using another email account is probably easiest. You don’t want to risk missing an important email while you are looking.
You’re required to provide full personal details to be hired to an employer with dubious security.
I don’t know, but I’ve been told…
You MAY THINK you’re submitting an application directly to an employer’s Personnel Office on that employer’s Web site, but you’re actually submitting your application to that employer’s contracted head hunter — hence the junk mail because that head hunter has other clients to recruit for. It’s the lack of transparency that gripes me.
… so the head hunter has to use restrictive filters on applications they relay to all their clients because they can’t rely on the applicant to vet employers they’d be interested in beforehand. These restrictive filters reject applicants for silly reasons like not having experience with every single piece of software on an arbitrary list of brand names.
There is no sunset date to an application made through a third party. The head hunter and his clients will continue to bug you in perpetuity.
They will continue to bug you about nonexistent openings. Just as they can sometimes find positions for people who are not actually looking for employment, they can sometimes place people with employers who have no open positions. It seems worth their while to try. After all, you MAY STILL BE in the market … sort of.
Employers and their head hunters continue to recruit for positions that have already been filled. This is the old “open requisition” problem. They aim to cover the risk that their new hires won’t pan out.
The more positions you apply for, the more head hunter databases you appear in. All their job-application software is incompatible, so you have to reapply and reapply and reapply, but it all seeks the same information: Are you currently employed? If not, they don’t know you.
I understand that my details would have to be sent to the company - however, I would really like to avoid posting them publicly. I have an argument for this - I know a lot of hacks begin with using Linkedin to find employees.
The only way to maintain privacy and job hunt is through a strong social network, and I’m not talking Facebook. When you have enough contacts/friends in a sector, you can ask around.
This. Write an email that says “Happy belated New Year…” and says you’re looking for a job and what kind of job, and send it to everyone you know in your field.
When you are job hunting you don’t want privacy, you want your info (i.e. your cv) as widely distributed and known as possible. Create a dedicated gmail account.
The key is to keep your professional internet profile andnl your private digital life separated.
Create a dedicated gmail account.
Great advice. I got a cheap Chromebook, a burner flip-phone, and use Google docs, meet, email, etc only when on that system.
Just a warning that LinkedIn and the like try to link your private and corporate information.
Its true but they also aren’t accounting for people actively trying to prevent that. Like someone else said below, dedicated email, dedicated phone number, use containers in your browser, use a work profile on your phone, etc. It may raise red flags somewhere but it is what it is.
That’s what I do, but they tied my work email to my LinkedIn profile anyway… I keep my personal life offline aside from work and use pseudonyms on systems like this, so they aren’t linking the rest of my life, but they didn’t have any issues tying down my professional identity.
Like they went and investigated you to find out what your work email is and then applied it to your profile without your consent?
It’s not in my profile, but if you search my work address, my profile is the single result.
You can’t job hunt privately, the whole point is to sell your services to a public market.
LinkedIn is a crime against humanity.
Become self-employed, I guess?
Find a company you want to work for, hack into their accounts and add yourself to their payroll.
Hack into their system and upload your resume.
You’re hired!
No, no, I’m hired
Unless you specifically look for jobs at politically oriented organisations (eg companies that pander to the privacy-conscious crowd, non-profits, etc), I just keep my professional life and my political life separate. I’m sure most people just have a “work profile” for job stuff and keep their personal life private.
Instead of doing LinkedIn, look at individual companies’ web pages for their careers section. Make a temp email, look at LinkedIn or other job sites to see who’s hiring, then look at those companies’ web pages.
Indeed doesn’t take any personal info or require an account.
I go years between linkedin logins. Every time I log in to look at a profile or whatnot, I get bombarded with spam for months.
I’ve been using LinkedIn with addy.io’s aliases a couple years without issue, I can’t say if that somehow makes your profile less promoted, I can only say that I’ve been receiving a few proposals here and there, don’t have a lot of experience, so I think it’s reasonable I don’t get swamped in them.
To be fair though, the real privacy concern is all the information you have to share about yourself and that can’t be avoided, regardless of the platform, you have to give details about you because that’s the entire reason you would be on such a platform to begin with, to make yourself known.
What you can do is leave out all the details you’re not comfortable sharing publicly and instead wait for recruiters to eventually ask you for those themselves, so you know that it only goes with one party that you have interacted with and can “trust”, rather than the wider internet.As for the email spam, there are a LOT of bs emails you receive by default from LinkedIn, but you can disable them, it took a while for me to figure out which is which because they have so many settings, but now I managed to have only what I care about, which is pretty much requests for connection and messages.
Also you don’t have to install their mobile app even if they bug you about it, you can get by with the mobile PWA and if you want to do any Easy Apply job applications, you can just temporarily switch to desktop modeBut if I made a temporary email for this purpose, I feel I might get blacklisted.
Make a temporary email on a private domain?
