don't post resumes online!

Madison is single, 27, and having finally found a job -- through a friend - she she is frantically trying to delete all of her personal job hunting records from the Net.

"I was really desperate when I was unemployed," sighs Madison. "I posted hundreds of resumes online and I never bothered to keep a record of where I had posted them."

"I also joined lots of groups and left my personal details all over the place hoping that someone, somewhere would take pity on me!"

"Now that I've found a new job and my self-esteem has returned I'm feeling so ashamed of what I did -- I was, in effect, prostituting myself by throwing around my personal details on the web."

"And yet I'm not the only person in the world who is forced to do this," sighs Madison. "Lots of unemployed people do it and lots of professional recruiters tell us to do it, too. 'If you're serious about finding a job you'll do it' they told me."

"I've found a lot of my old online resumes through the search engines," says Madison, "and some of them were full of silly typing errors because I did it all so fast."

"In the unlikely event that any employer actually read my online resume it would have given a very bad impression of my skills," laughs Madison, "but no genuine employer ever reads the online resumes -- the only people who read them are the perverts and now I'm scared someone is going to stalk me!"

"Not many of the online resume posting sites have an easy delete option," says Madison, "so I've had to email the webmasters to do it for me."

"So far I've received only one response from the webmasters I emailed requesting deletion of my personal records," says Madison. "I fear that some of the sites I posted my resume to are dead -- and will just stay online for the perverts to look at until the web server company removes them."

"On one website I was able to delete my resume very easily," says Madison, "but when I searched the site for anything with other file extensions -- such as cvs.doc or resumes.doc -- I was able to get a list of non-html documents in which I was still listed."

"Granted, this sort of document doesn't get published as it isn't html," says Madison, "but it does mean that the guys running the website keep a permanent record of my details and I don't like that."

An even worse scenario for Madison is that some of her online resumes might be in some search engine cache that takes months to refresh - or is even permanently listed in some obscure search engine that never updates.

"Even though my online resume might have been removed from the site," explains Madison, "my name and personal details might still be listed with various search engines for everyone to see."

"There is also the 'Wayback Machine' search engine at archive.org that caches everything that was published on the web in recent years."

"This particular search engine really annoys me," says Madison, "because everyone has posted something to a newsgroup or website that they later regret - either for personal or security reasons - and it's not nice that we are denied the right to delete things that were never intended to be permanent records."

"There could be a permanent online record of all my personal details - my name, address and telephone number - as well as all the typos, grammatical mistakes and inappropriate information I posted on the Net when I was out of work and desperate," groans Madison.

"The Internet is not only great for research," grimaces Madison, "but it's also great for snooping on silly people like me who don't know what they're getting into when they use the Net for job hunting -- so watch out everyone!."