OLIVE BRANCH, Miss. — An Olive Branch woman is sounding the alarm for older job seekers about the way an undesirable photo of her ended up on her online resume.
Ruth Young is an emergency medical technician looking for her next job. So she logged on to Zip Recruiter, made a profile and found a potential option.
“You have a choice of putting a picture on your resume or not. And I chose not to,” she said.
Through the website, she landed a phone interview for a manager job. During the interview, she started chatting with the woman on the other end of the line.
“I said, ‘You sound older than you look.’ She said, ‘I look young for my age.’ I said, ‘I do too. I’m 54 but I look like I’m in my 30s.’ She said, ‘You really do.’ I said, ‘Well how do you know that?’”
Young said the recruiter had a photo of her, even though she never set one to her online profile.
“It was a picture of me in my bathing suit with my swimming top on up to here,” she said, gesturing to her upper leg. “which is the only picture I have of me on Facebook.”
Young admitted she was not very tech-savvy, but she thinks it happened because of a confusing setting with her photos on her phone.
“It accesses your phone and you can do allow or deny. I guess because I didn’t do my settings in the app and didn’t do ‘deny,’ it accessed whatever it wanted to,” she said of using Zip Recruiter on her mobile phone.
She was still horrified and wanted to warn others to think before you post.
“If you’re looking for a job, its best to use a computer and ‘whatever-the-company-is-dot-com,’ instead of using a cell phone,” she said.
She also advised anyone signing up for something online to make sure they read the fine print.
WREG contacted ziprecruiter.com but has not yet heard back.