Ask HN: Is this recruitment tactic shady?
I quickly found a role by applying to a company directly and set my account on a number of CV sites (including Monster) to private. This is the current state of my profile. All other profiles I have across job sites have either been removed or disabled in this way.
Fast forward 2 years and I received an email today from a recruiter with the stock "your CV out of date, I am keen to talk to you" blurb. Usually this would go straight in the bin, I get about 10 of these a week so this isn't anything new.
This email however was part of a chain, and the recruiter had accidentally (I assume) forwarded me an email from a company called Logic Melon with a header saying:
You requested the details for <MY NAME> (from Monster). The C.V. should be attached as it was downloaded. Please find the details below.
Underneath this were details of my email address, mobile phone number, current location and date the profile was last updated.
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.
I'm already fairly prejudiced about software recruitment firms from numerous run-ins with them in the past, so my natural response is to feel this is pretty shady behavior but should I be feeling so uncomfortable about this?
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mother being able to read and save it, but I didn't really think that my CV and personal contact details would have been archived and continued to be used by recruiters long after I disabled my account. 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.