Ever shopped the online job boards in search of a new career opportunity? Most of us are always looking for a new opportunity that is closer to home, offers better pay or maybe just offers a new challenge. We can find out about, and apply for, multiple job openings in a single sitting. The good job boards can indeed lead us to good jobs and most of us have developed our favorites. I'm an IT professional, so I tend to shop the boards like Dice.com and CraigsList.org since you can search these boards based on locale.

Of late, however, I've seen a lot more of the Monster types infecting my favorite places to shop for a new job. Some of these infections include job announcements that do not include salary information and announcements that don't list contact information for the company other than an email address for sending your resume. Some announcements (the ones I personally find most annoying) ask you to click a link to fill out a complete dossier on yourself via the company's (or the recruiter's) data collection form.

Some of them are outright ridiculous in their intrusive questioning! For example, one questionnaire I received AFTER the recruiter received my resume asked me to describe all the things listed ON MY RESUME. Does the pat "see resume" apply here? Another sent me a form on some other company's stationary that I was supposed to just sign and return after providing my social security number. The purpose of this form was to authorize some third-party company to run a credit check and criminal background on me. This form was sent via email and I had never met the potential employer face-to-face.

I've also found in my never-ending search for a good job that some of the same jobs are listed over and over again -- for years even. Naturally, this makes one wonder if the jobs are real or if somebody just reposts the same announcements on some sort of schedule.

At other times, I get responses from people that I did not know had my resume because some employer or recruiter has taken it upon himself to forward my private information to someone else without my consent or knowledge. What is that all about? Did you know that to apply for some online jobs, you are required to post your social security number into web forms that are not even secured sites? (Secured sites begin with https://www instead of http://www...)

The presumptions of employers and recruiters leave me with the impression that employers don't have much respect for job seekers. Not a problem. They don't have to respect me, but in today's world of information hoarding, information stealing and identity theft, shouldn't employers (and recruiters) respect our privacy? If they don't, shouldn't they be required to at least provide a disclaimer that they share your information/don't care about your information and don't give a darn about the risks they ask you to undertake?

Last week in downtown Washington, DC, a temporary recruiting company was evicted from their office; their belongings were set out on the street and everything they had left in their office was kicked to the curb because they failed to pay their rent. Who cares, right? Well that company's files which consisted of resumes and job applications complete with full names, addresses and social security numbers of job applicants was also set out on the curb, unsecured and unprotected for anybody to peruse freely. It wasn't until someone complained about all the people rummaging through those files that the police had to intervene and secure the private data contained in those files.

So to put this into perspective, applying for jobs is risky business for us today. If somebody put some controls over what information employers and recruiters are allowed to collect without a bona fide offer of a job, the risk could be minimized. In other words, there is no reason for job applicants to provide social security numbers, full addresses and meet other information demands just to make the employer's or recruiter's life a little easier and their unprotected files complete.

Suppose I just need to collect email addresses for people in a particular field for the purpose of selling them? Could that be a reason to post the same jobs over and over on a job board? If there were a truth in job board advertising law, could this information hoarding scam be shut down?