Mark of the Beast
For those of you who don’t know, I’ve just completed a job search and this morning I thought I’d try to go in and delete my accounts on the career websites I’ve been using. Simple operation you might think, but so far I’m 0 for 2.
The first site that I had to deal with was 3M. My first complaint there was that I kept receiving job postings from my “job agent” but the emails didn’t contain a link to unsubscribe from the mailings. Things got worse as I logged in, as I couldn’t find a way to delete my account (I was able to unsubscribe from the job agent, though). My solution here was to just enter bogus information. I’m now Big Bird at 651-555-5555 along with a bogus email address. Thankfully, they didn’t have much information on me, so it wasn’t too much to falsify.
The bigger challenge came when working with Monster.com. Now this is one of the best known career websites. You’d think they’d have easily accessible options for removing your information from their databases. No. I’m almost positive this is intentional. Some business genius figures that if they can avoid having people remove their profiles people will continue to use their service for their next job search. I’m sorry, there is no way I want to trust them with that much personal information in the long run. I really wasn’t comfortable giving them the information when I was looking for a job.
Anyway, after about 15 minutes of searching through the website, I came a FAQ that actually tells you how to delete your profile. You need to CALL them directly. This from a company who is pretty much entirely web based. The call center is (of course) in India, and when you manage to navigate through the multiple menu levels to talk to a real person, they still ask you if you’d like to just disable the account rather than delete it.
For those of you who may be google-ing for how to remove your info from monster, just call there phone number 1-800-MONSTER (1-800-666-7837). I think it’s appropriate that the first 3 digits of their # is 666.
CareerBuilder.com is next on my list. If things are as tough there as it was on Monster, I’m sure another post will be out this afternoon.
May 9th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Update: 3M actually called me back about a month after I tried to delete my information from their website. I appreciate the interest, but they were a little slow on the draw.