How to Apply Smartly Online Without Compromising Your Security

Guest Article by Tina L. Douglas

Job seeking can definitely be full of ironies. When applying for a job, you share many important details to a stranger, the human resource person with the hope and confidence that the person holding this vital information about you keeps it confidential.

Though you promote yourself to these people as a valuable addition to the company, you also hold back to protect yourself from what is now called identity theft. Being the fastest rising crime in America and a new avenue for modern thieves to steal valuables from people, you need to be careful. These Internet thieves may very well hack the Internet, which may be lacking in security, a disparity in technology or simply by human mistake.

A story was told of a nonprofit client who was moving her things to another place and found a big large box in one of her spaces containing what every identity thief has been voraciously pining for – a box full of resumes with information ranging from home addresses, social security numbers, passports, birth certificates, maiden names, signatures, and many more. Ellen B. Vance, HR consultant and auditor of The Titan Group, and HR Consultancy in VA., relates this. She told of how she and the nonprofit client almost collapsed at the site of all the valuable information that was owned by many people and how dangerous it would be if all of it was mishandled.

Situations such as this could prove to be fatal, as when 800,000 U.S. and Canadian jobseekers lost their personal information when The Gap’s job application website was hacked by cyber crooks, as well as Aetna’s job application website. Aetna for its part was sued last June 2009 for its failure to secure all the vital information.

If you’re an applicant and are so eager to share you information about yourself to make you more marketable, you can better protect yourself by being cautious in disclosing information and not let your enthusiasm cloud your judgment on what information to share. One tip as advised by Lorne Epstein, creator of Inside Job, a Facebook community of jobseekers, is to not include your home address when sending resumes online since companies contact you through phone or email anyway, and to leave out blank segments that ask for social security numbers.

As many people are making use of the technology to get their careers starting or moving up, and simply just want to live decent lives earning a living, crooks see this as an opportunity to do their stuff to earn their own living as well- by stealing valuable information and using it at the cost of destroying other people’s lives. By being wary in taking these pointers for applying for a job online, you may very well not only land a good legitimate job, but protect yourself from those who want to steal your identity and your life.