Protecting Your Privacy During a Job Search
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When searching for a new job, it is common practice to share personal information with potential employers, recruiters, and job boards. However, in today's digital age, where data breaches and identity theft happen on the daily, it's more important than ever to be wary and thoughful about what is shared. Finding that balance of being transparent while also protecting your personal information can be challenging whether you're actively applying for jobs or just exploring opportunities. Here are some tips that I've found helpful in maintaining privacy during a job search.
Use a dedicated job search email address
First of all, privacy aside, it helps keep your main inbox tidy and ensures you'll never lose an important job-search email in the flood of spam, promotional messages, and newsletters of your main email account.
Privacy-wise, it helps provide yet another layer of security for your main email address, especially if it is a public résumé. If it's out on the open web, it will be automatically scraped bots, spammers, and data brokers.
I've recently signed up for Fastmail and found it a refreshing experience to start with a new email address that is not tied to any of my previous accounts. It has a clean interface, strong privacy policies, and excellent spam filtering. It also supports custom domains, so I can use my own domain name for my email address. My favorite feature is the ability to create aliases on the fly, which is useful for signing up for different job boards and tracking where spam might be coming from.
Fastmail doesn't cost much and is one more step on my path of reducing my use of Google products. Note how I say reduce, not eliminate, as that seems more realistic given how entrenched Google is in our lives. Harm reduction with regard to internet privacy is still a valid option. If you want a free-to-start option, you can use ProtonMail or Tutanota, which are both privacy-focused email providers.
Avoid using your real phone number
If you're including your phone number on your résumé or CV, use a number that is not your main phone number. If you need a free VOIP phone number that can also text, try signing up for one with Google Voice. Yes, it's yet another Google product, but it is free and can be used to receive calls and texts without revealing your real phone number. I did some research and found that there isn't really any viable free alternative that can do both calls and texts. If you want to pay for a service, you can try Sideline or Burner, which offer more features and flexibility.
Now, there are many other tips that my IDE is happily suggesting, but I think these two are the most important ones so far based on my real experience. If I happen upon more privacy tips and tricks for the job search, I will make sure to update this post.