Another cloud has appeared in the online recruitment horizon: legitimate resumes sent by e-mail are being junked by company spam filters.

The Internet was expected to speed up—and change—the job search process for both job seekers and recruiters. Instead of using paper and a stamp to respond to job ads, job seekers could now e-mail their resumes directly to a company or scan job ads online and apply through an online job board. Companies are relying more on keywords to help manage the stacks of resumes they receive.

Accordingly, job seekers were coached to rewrite their resumes using keywords and phrases to increase the odds that their resumes would be noticed. But most job seekers and recruiters don't often think about what can trigger a spam filter:

• Accomplishments that indicate a direct dollar impact on a company's bottom line.
• Popular prescription drugs that are also the subject of spam messages.
• Innocuous words and phrases taken out of context, such as "trial," "education," or "degree".
• E-mail addresses that contain many numbers to the left side of the @ sign, such as [email protected], which look like it might contain the tracking code that spammers use.
• Job seekers who use "resume-blasting" services to send out hundreds of resumes at a time.
• Many recruiters ask for a resume formatted in MS Word sent as an attachment because they're easier to read than plain text. However, some spam filters automatically block messages with attached files from unknown addresses, according to Susan Joyce of Job-Hunt.org.

There is no question that spam continues to spiral out of control, despite recent legislation and technologies designed to stem the flow. In its second annual independent study of the cost of spam Nucleus Research, a global research and technology advisory firm, found that the average cost of spam per year per employee more than doubled from 2003 to $1,934. In the study, which was based on interviews with Fortune 500 companies, Nucleus also found:

• The average employee receives nearly 7,500 spam messages per year, up from 3,500 in 2003.
• Average lost productivity per year per employee is 3.1%, up from 1.4% in 2003.
• Companies using spam filters report that on average they are able to filter only 20% of the incoming spam, down from 26% in 2003.

As first reported in April in the Wall Street Journal, while companies have tightened their e-mail filters in an effort to block spam and computer viruses from getting through, the unintended consequence has been to also stop legitimate e-mail, including resumes, from getting through.

According to Mark Mehler of Careerxroads, a recruiting-technology consulting firm, people count on their e-mailed resumes reaching the intended reader. Now, he says, spam gatekeepers stop suspicious e-mail at the front door-including resumes.

There are no data to quantify the problem because job seekers aren't usually notified when their resumes have been junked by a spam filter. It would be fair to say, however, that the probability of e-mailed resumes being caught in spam filters is likely higher than we think. Spam filters work by scanning message headers for valid e-mail addresses; message content for specific words that are common to spam; and the source of the message, that is, does it come from an Internet service provider (ISP) known to be used by spammers. Most filters rely on a wide range of tests, not just one, to determine if an e-mail is spam.

The Journal story featured job seekers like Tim Bishop, a software engineer and product developer whose his experience went something like this: Bishop sent out a cover letter and resume, only to see it appear in his own spam filter half an hour later. As Bishop wrote in his web blog, "Apparently words like Standards, Marketing, System, Proven, Global, Experience, President, Technologies, Product, Project, Manager, Director, Startups, and Software, which appear in my resume, are also common in the spam I receive. To some degree this makes sense -- resumes and cover letters, like spam, are a form of self-promotion."

Bishop adds, "Email has evolved in a very short period of time (~10 years) to become a critical means of business communication...However, the measures being used to combat the rising flood of spam are now threatening email, because they make email unreliable. It used to be that when you sent email, it either got to its destination, or it bounced. Now there is a significant possibility that an email will simply disappear into the black hole of spam filters, with no notification to sender or intended recipient."

Since spam filters are computer programs, it's not surprising that legitimately e-mailed resumes are coming up as "false positives" and tagged as spam. Here are a few tips to reduce the likelihood that some resumes because will be blocked as spam:

• Check your spam folder every day—and revise the rules on your e-mail program to increase its effectiveness.
• Ask applicants to use a very traditional subject line, such as the job title the company has used when posting the ad.
• Enlist your Information Technology department to help by checking messages caught in the filter and forwarding them to you.
• Similarly, help your IT folks by providing them with feedback on acceptable terms to bypass the filter.
• If your company does not have a Web-based portal for candidates to apply for job openings, this is a good opportunity to do so. This way, e-mail and spam filters are eliminated from the resume submission equation because the resume is entered directly into a database.

At press time, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Internet heavyweights including Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s America Online unit and Earthlink Inc. are "working together to develop standard technologies for authenticating e-mail senders, which the companies say will make it easier for mail recipients to beat back spam, scams, and viruses." (June 9, 2004)

Corinne Marasco is editor of ChemHR and an associate editor at Chemical & Engineering News specializing in human resource and workplace management topics.