TheSocialCV, de people aggregator uit de UK, komt binnenkort met een in mijn optiek bijzonder logische dienst: FreshUp. Wat niets anders is dan een update-service voor cv’s. Heb je een database met cv’s van kandidaten? Dan claimt TheSocialCV dat ze deze cv’s kan actualiseren. Voor maximaal 20 pence (tja, het bedrijf denkt blijkbaar nog altijd dat de UK de navel van de wereld is…) per cv.
Met een belangrijke praktische vraag: hoe krijg ik die nieuwe informatie in mijn bestaande cv-database? Ik ga maar eens uitzoeken wat deze nieuwe dienst nou precies betekent. En wat voor privacy consequenties hier allemaal aan vastzitten. Maar interessant is het wel.
Michel Rijnders
says:Hi Bill,
Thanks for your answer. As far as I understand I understood your service wrong. It is an search engine and you are not actually adding information (career and education information) to old / existing user generated CV’s? Because that raised my privacy and user agreement questions.
Michel
bill fischer
says:Hi Michel,
Thanks for your question. It raises lots of really interesting issues. I’m not an expert on European law but have studied many of the privacy lawsuits that have been filed is several jurisdictions and they have consistently found that the business of search engines like Google is legal. We follow the same protocols that Google does [small extracts of data with a link to the original source material].
I put your name into Google and a found a link to your LinkedIn profile and your twitter profile and your facebook profile. In Google, I saw that you are a project manager in the online recruitment space. I ran the same search in Bing and saw your quora and your wordpress blog and I learned you are fan of “social media.” Bing and Google both store this information in a database. Are Google and Bing violating European Law? Social media sites allow their information to be indexed by search engines and it is also in their terms-of-service that public posts will be made available to search engines. Is it illegal or against the terms-of-service to use Bing to find a job candidate’s LinkedIn profile. Why do individuals post their CVs on the internet if not to be found in search engines? If a recruiter added your name to a database of potential candidates for a job based upon searches in Google would they be breaking the law. Would their company be in violation of European Law? There are also hundreds of other search engines that cache this same data are they all breaking European Law? Is it against European Law for a recruiter to look at Google before interviewing a job candidate? Is it illegal for a company to use a search engine like Google to get information on someone before meeting with them? If they put notes in their customer database from information they found on Google is their company in violation of European Law?
My understanding is that there are thousands of search engines that index the web and that social media sites, including blogs, make their data available to them. I believe that it’s legal for a recruiter to use a search engine like Google to get information on a candidate. They just have to be mindful of how they use it.
Cheers,
Bill
bill fischer
says:Hi Marc,
Good catch on the “sneak preview” of this product. We sent out a few emails and a couple of tweets to gauge market interest and have had some really interesting responses to it. We will be launching the product formally later this month.
We are happy to update both CVs and resumes and take payment in nearly any currency. And with prices as low as €0.02 for larger databases we think it provides good value. One can hire an intern to take an old CV, run a bunch of Google searches, and input the data into an ATS, or simply provide us with email addresses and get back a structured HRXML based upon our semantic extractions from more than 10 billion public documents. If your readers have any questions, we’re happy to answer them, in part because we’re looking for customers, but also because we’re learning how to describe this new product.
Cheers,
Bill
Michel Rijnders
says:Hi Bill,
I am interested in the privacy aspect of your service. As far as I know collecting personal information and putting that information in a database is against European Law and against the user agreements of most social networks e.g. Linkedin. It seems that your service extracts and collects such information without consent of the users. What is your view on that?
Cheers,
Michel