Job Seeker Wins First Page Google Result
Her resume was posted on a website and was indexed by Google …exposing it all.
Have you ever submitted a resume’ or other personal information to a company only to have it show up on the Internet, in it’s entirety, on Google search results?
That’s what happened recently to a job seeker in Calgary. She passed her resume onto a large professional association in hopes that it may be used to place a “job seeker” ad at the website. Little did she know that they were going to upload the resume’ to their website and make it public. The association may not have even meant to expose the document. May website owners don’t realize that even documents uploaded into a “client only” area can in some cases be indexed by search engines.
Here is what the client had to say,
“Thanks for your assistance earlier. As I mentioned, xxxxxx provides a wonderful service involving allowing job seekers to submit their resumes for posting to the xxxxxx website. A few months ago, I submitted my resume to xxxxxxx. Recently I decided to use the Google search engine to do a search on myself. I was curious about what the public will be able to retrieve when they enter
“xxx_my_name_xxx Calgary” into a search engine. Unfortunately, as a result of submitting my resume to the xxxxxx website anyone who enters “xxxxxxx” into a search engine can now retrieve my entire resume.In the past I have submitted my resume to job search sites (for example, like Monster and Workopolis) and it doesn’t make my resume available for the the entire world to see if they enter my name into a search engine. “
The job seeker spoke to the professional association to remove the resume from their website and received a response back that it is removed. When I investigated, the document is still online and still shows up in Google search engine results. While the website owner may very well have removed links referencing the document, the physical PDF file still remains on the server. This roots itself in “out of site, out of mind”, but on a webserver, once a document is indexed by a search engine the spiders will come back and check on it. As long as the document resides on the public server, it will not drop out of the index.
While many people fight to have their website and documents surface on first page of Google, this is one case where the call to Ulistic was to help get it off of Google. The calls for ‘reverse SEO‘ or reputation management are increasing. Unheard of three years ago, reputation management is a phrase that we are all sadly going to have to learn.
To the credit of the professional association, it is clear that they are offering to make submitted resume’s available on the website for public viewing. It was not clear to this particular website visitor though and she did not realize that the PDF file she submitted would win her a first page placement on Google.
Ulistic Inc. is a Calgary Internet Consultancy where our team of expert internet consultants deal with this type of issue daily. Do you need and internet consultant on your team?
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Ulistic focuses on serving the needs of Business, REALTORS, and Information Technology firms across Canada and United States. Helping your business understand, deploy and leverage social media, search engine optimization and online communications to generate business opportunities and make an impact inside your community and industry.
My business partner Stuart and I are business professionals first. We understand what it takes to run a successful small business.
I invite you to reach out to me personally at 403.775.2205 or email dawest@ulistic.com.
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