Purloined resume

[Jon Johanning]

Hi all,

I just learned from someone working for an agency that they received a resume from someone who sent them my resume (in PDF form) with a fake email address pasted in over mine (using a completely different font than the one used in my resume). When they asked that person to fill out an NDA, it turned out that the person was from Italy.

Is there something I can do about this? Or is it just an unavoidable hazard in this business. I suppose that if it happens again, someone will see that the font of the email address they are looking at doesn't match the rest of the PDF, but probably most people are not that perceptive.

TIA

Jon Johanning

[Bill Lise]

I have often heard of this happening to translators. Is it avoidable? Probably not if you have your resume in an accessible place in cyberspace. So it would be best not to have your resume where everyone can grab and misuse it.

And, of course, there are business models in which a translator doesn't need to create a resume, but that is a topic for a different discussion.

For agencies, it would behoove them to have direct, non-email interaction with people they want to use. In the case you cite, the agency caught it, but it might work in many cases in which there is no direct contact.
Bill @ rainy Yokohama

[Matthew Schlecht]

Yeah, I've had my résumé cloned a number of times.

Sometimes they take the whole thing and paste in a different phone number (with country code) or email address, as they did with you.

Sometimes they just steal your content and feather that into their own résumé.

If you want to have your résumé "out there" to win and influence clients, there's not much you can do about these kleptoparasites. You could lock your PDF, but that will only slow the KPs down a little bit and will inconvenience your potential clients who want to feed your data directly from your PDF into their database.

Often, someone who receives the cloned résumé will already know you independently, and will alert you. That's usually how I find out.

You could craft a nasty cease & desist letter, and send that to their email address.

If you can determine whether the miscreant is a member of any professional organization, you can alert that organization to their misdeeds.

Otherwise, this imitation game is a fact of life.

Matthew Schlecht, PhD
Word Alchemy Translation, Inc.
Newark, DE, USA
wordalchemytranslation.com