Some spam filters mistakenly block e-mailed resumes

On a recent Monday morning, Olga Ocon, an employment recruiter in Los Altos, Calif., decided to sift through a folder containing e-mails identified as spam. Tucked away among 756 ads for Viagra, cell phones and loan-refinancing offers, which were all set to be deleted after a few days, were eight resumes.

Every week, Ocon receives more spam, increasing the chances that she could miss a good job candidate. "If it's in there, it's going to be harder to dig out," she says. She suspects that one resume containing the phrases "four-time winner of sales awards" and "oversaw in excess of $40,000,000 in sales" was caught by a program on her computer that is designed to filter out e-mail containing money-making offers.

Jeffery Warner, who sent that resume, also is troubled by the effects of spam. "It's hindering employers that are looking for the right people, and of course it's hurting the people that are out there seeking jobs," he says. The 51-year-old former marketing manager in the Dallas-Fort Worth area says his resume has been identified as spam several other times.

As companies have tightened e-mail filters in recent months to keep out spam and a spate of damaging computer viruses, they also unintentionally have blocked all sorts of legitimate e-mail. Few companies are talking about it, but e-mails containing job seekers' resumes are among the files commonly being deleted, according to recruiting-technology experts.

"It seems to be a huge problem," says Mark Mehler, a principal of CareerXroads, a recruiting-technology consulting firm in Kendall Park, N.J. "People have been trained that if they put their resume into an e-mail, it gets through. Today, they might be stopped at the front door."

It is difficult to gauge just how widespread the problem is — in some cases neither companies nor job seekers are notified about e-mails that simply are deleted by spam-filtering systems. Yet, since many employers now advise applicants to send resumes via e-mail rather than the post office, the issue is becoming a big headache for job seekers as well as companies.

Resumes, along with other legitimate e-mail, most commonly are blocked when companies set spam and virus filters too high, according to Dan Nadir, vice president of product management with FrontBridge Technologies Inc., a Marina del Rey, Calif., company that provides spam-filtering and virus-protection software. E-mail-filtering systems typically scan the content of messages for particular words that are common to spam. The mere presence of words such as "free," "expand," "trial," "mortgage" or exclamation points or colored backgrounds — all of which might be used by resume writers — could trigger some filters, Nadir says.