We got started for two reasons: one personal and one philosophical. The personal one first.
Personal
Resume Everywhere got started when I was working on landing contracts for my consulting business. Between the GSA certification process (loads of fun, let me tell you) and then endless stream of forms both for online contracting and the more traditional people-you-know network, I became thoroughly tired of enter the exact same data over and over and over again. There had to be a better way.
Philosophical
The other thing; if you read the Terms of Service of most of the sites, you’ll find something very interesting: You don’t own your own resume data. The sites does. I think that’s fundamentally wrong. You worked very hard to build your reputation, and your reputation is not something to which LinkedIn should be able to lay claim.
Think I’m joking? Here’s the relevant portion from the LinkedIn ToS:
…[Y]ou grant LinkedIn a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royalty-free right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, any information you provide, directly or indirectly to LinkedIn, including but not limited to any user generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques or data to the services, you submit to LinkedIn, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.
Non-lawyer translation: You give us your resume data and we can do anything we want to with it, at any time, for any reason, whether you want us to or not. Furthermore, if you happen to put an idea into our system and we like it, we can take it and do whatever we want to do with it, at any time, for any reason, whether you want us to or not — and we’re not going to pay you anything for it.
This is not to pick on LinkedIn; Monster, Dice, Indeed — everyone pretty much has the same kind of ToS. Everyone, that is, except us. Here’s our Privacy Policy:
You will have the right to restrict access to your resume data by recruiters as you see fit.
We will only contact you when you say we can.
- We may contact you with probable opportunities based on our matching algorithm, but only when you have indicated you are willing to accept such communications.
We will sell access to your resume data to recruiters (and other interested parties, such as third party analysts and academics).
- At all times, your privacy will be protected to the fullest extent of applicable law.
- At no time will your data be sold for marketing purposes. Ever.
We do not have any advertising, nor do we knowingly support any advertising operations (through data mining or other techniques).
That’s it. You own your data, not us; you let us trade on your data in exchange for access to our services. Sounds like a fair deal to me.
