So if you're looking for a job and post your resume on the web, what do you think about your employer spotting it? My feeling is this: I'm advertising my availability. (I'm not, boss, honest, this is for discussion's sake)

But how does an employer deal with that information? And I'll go you one better. One of my employees once posted their resume online and listed some proprietary financial data as part of their accomplishments. I had a heart-to-heart and reminded him that while I always wanted people to seek positions where they were happy, an obligation existed to not release confidential data.

Have you been in a similar circumstance? What would you do or what have you done?

Nobody has ever confronted me about my resume being online. But, I usually try to find what job sites my current company is using before I post mine online.

And, I typically only post a confidential resume at Monster. Makes life a little easier that way.

Amy

Well, I've been fairly careful about where and how I post my resume. But I've only actively looked for a job while employed once (I'd previously always been laid off before I got to the point of considering leaving) and I found everything about the process uncomfortable. The only job search site I posted my resume on was hotjobs and I had it set to private only, meaning I controlled who saw it. There was a bug in the system and it was publicly available for 15 minutes. I got three inquiries during that time. It was really scary, and really made me realize that my then current employer could possibly see the resume if I wasn't very careful.

I do post it one other place. I have two shell accounts. One holds my primary personal website. The other doesn't have a home page and is basically a collection of random pages I want accessible online but I don't want advertised. I don't crosslink. I put a copy of my last resume on the second site for critique by friends. It's still sitting there in case I ever have need of it.

The company proprietary data is inexcusable. At my first job I wrote a detailed design spec covering how to model different types of acoustic sensors in a single application as part of a grant proposal. It was about 40 pages long and some of the best work I've ever done. I not only wrote the spec but also determined the algorithms used in the modeling. When I got laid off I was reminded that the spec was proprietary information. During that job search I was at a disadvantage, not having anything tangible to show from my previous job. Had I still been employed and just chose to look for another job, I would have had access to this spec and to code that belonged to my company. I would have been able to share it as an indication of the type of work I did. But if I chose to do so I would have broken my ethical contract with that employer, which is what your employee did.

Janice