Kaye Monty

If you are a recruiter, then you are most likely waging the never ending battle against spam.  The spam which consumes about 97% of email according to a study by Microsoft rather than the meat in a can variety.  As much as I love a good spam musubi, I hate email spam.  My blog has been flooded by spam which means that I have to spend several minutes sorting through legitimate comments versus spam from online casino.  Not only is spam bad for the environment, it just sucks up time.  Time which I do not have and would prefer to do something more productive.

Recruiters are prone to spam because we post jobs that require us to leave a reply to address.  We can direct candidates to an online applicant tracking system (ATS) which forces candidates to register and submit their resume.  A well designed ATS makes it very easy for candidates to apply online.  A poorly designed ATS is incredibly cumbersome that you candidates just give up and move on to the next job posting. Unfortunately, not all companies can afford to have an ATS so they manually go through every resume.  This exposes them to posting resumes online.  

Even if you have an ATS, you still have to post your resumes to niche sites.   Others leave you exposed to the spammers of the world.  What can you do?

• Unique email address – I worked for a company that assigned a unique email address to each job.  The system administrator had to create an email address everytime that I opened a job.  This might be great for a small company but could be cumbersome for a larger company unless they gave administrative rights to the recruiter to add/delete these email addresses.
• Anynomous email addresses - Some sites such as Craigslist provide you an anonymous reply to email address.  If they do, then take advantage of this option as it is an easy solution.
• Break up the email address – Some professional organizations send email job blasts to members on a weekly basis.  Instead of listing your email address, you can list it as yourname (at) yourcompany (dot) com.  This seems to deter some spammers for now although it confuses some of the administrators managing the email lists.