Ask HN: Is this recruitment tactic shady?

> What it looks like is that a recruiter has paid a third party service to retrieve my CV it scraped from Monster in 2014 and get my contact details. Contact details that shouldn't exist in the open.

In 2014 your profile was public, so your contact information did exist in the open. May not be legal for a company to crawl Monster to store information though, you would have to look at Monster's terms of service (for example LinkedIn doesn't allow apps to store LinkedIn data, only to retrieve them via the API).

>I understand that placing my personal details on a job board would have resulted in everyone and their mother being able to read and save it, but I didn't really think that my CV and personal contact details would have been archived and continued to be used by recruiters long after I disabled my account.

Everything you put on the Internet is available to everybody until the end of times. Internalize that and you'll be fine :)

> I disabled my account as an indication that I was no longer looking for work, contacting me in this way is fairly blatantly ignoring this preference.

Recruiters don't give a damn about your preferences. Just blacklist this guy.

This is interesting, and has made me think about the recruiters that contact me.

Early in my career I thought I wanted to be a project manager, so I tailored my CV to junior project manager jobs and uploaded it to several job sites. I haven't really used job boards since then.

Now, several years later, I am regularly emailed by recruiters about senior PM / programme manager jobs. I've never understood why, since I've never indicated any interest in this type of job.

It's almost as if they have obtained an old CV and extrapolated to the type of jobs they think I would be interested now, years later.

I'm possibly being paranoid, but your story made me think!

For me it's totally understandable that you dislike what the recruiter did. He (she?) was trying to sell you (with all the details you posted on the job board) as a candidate. Without your consent or even knowledge.

This is why we have laws about personally identifiable information in EU.

Scraping and saving resumes is a common tactic. I know recruiters from Companies You've Heard Of and even their big, well known company scrapes daily.

As for selling the information later, that's a different issue (and one that I agree is not ethical).

Report it.

https://ico.org.uk/

Please do, I really dislike these shady companies. The only way to stop them is to have them reported.

On a side note when I'm contacted like this, typically from people trying to sell B2B services sometimes I amuse myself by replying "I'll talk if you tell me where you got my email". They never say. I also leave customised emails to a catch-all domain for some sites and occasionally see these data leaks but it is surprisingly rare.