How Many Resumes Are There on the Internet?

[Irina Shamaeva]

Here is a cool blog post contest. Post a blog (anywhere) with an estimate of the number of resumes on the Internet and win a ticket to #TRUsource in Atlanta. 

 

We are looking for resumes on the open ("surface") we that are Google-able. Profiles and bios don't count.

Please email Geoff Webb with a reference to your post. The deadline is next Friday, June 18th 2010. The winner will be chosen by Geoff Webb, Glen Cathey, Chris Havrilla, Jim Stroud, and myself.

In addition, I will give my Google-Based sourcing DVD to a randomly selected author out of the first five people who post. 

I looked around and here are some interesting numbers I was able to pick.

What we are looking for in the contest is suggesting some sort of a proof or a method or a thought process to help count resumes along with a number. It's OK to quote authorities (like "Jim Stroud said...") but we encourage participants to suggest some other evidence :)

Please feel free to post an answer or a link to your answer as a reply here. 

[Ray Towle]

A great question Irina,

HMMMmmm, I'll say that as of June 13th 2010 there are approximately 78,900, 000. resumes, curriculum vitaes, or CVs that are publicly available on the Internet, both on the world-wide web and within the deep web. That said, some of these are duplicates, some are completely outdated, and some are so confidential, that they are virtually anonymous. But far more importantly, there are far more resumes available than any one person could every review; e.g. at 1 resume review per minute, and an average of 526,320 minutes per year, that would take about 150 years, and the umber of resumes is growing.

All the best to you and the entire BrainGain Team.

Ray Towle
Sharpsburg, Georgia, U.S. of A.

[Christine McKenzie]

Hi Irina,
I would like to suggest that there are approx 1,050,000 resumes and CV's viewable from Google. I have also submitted my answer to Geoff via the link above.

Thanks,
Chrissy

[Ruth-Dinaz Sarkari]

As of June 16, 2010-
trying to do this methodically and there are various options I have not tried but starting with

intitle:resume (and variations thereof like CV, curriculum vitae) and adding -sample and then -~job to clear out junk (to some extent, it will not be perfect) I arrive at about 10.9 - 15 million resumes. Trying to work it further and stuck with Google's "We're sorry...your computer or network may be sending automated queries" message.But basically one should run several iterations of string above and also use
inurl:resume (and variations thereof like CV, curriculum vitae) with similar add ons to remove junk as well filetype:pdf | doc | rtf | docx to generate more results. Then there are those resumes posted on homepages via ISPs that may not necessarily have the word resume or CV in the title or url. There will be some duplication in all of this, no doubt, but we are aiming for a ballpark #.
Thought process - I feel 10-15 million is a bit low considering the world's population (6.8 billion in 2009). A subset of this population is those that have computers (~1 billion)and overlapped with that is a section of the population that does not own but uses the internet (library etc - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet >>As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population uses the services of the Internet.) which is 1.7 billion. So let's make an educated guess that 2 billion people have computers OR use internet in the world. Then the final subset of that would be those that have actually posted their resumes on the web via homepages/personal pages etc. since not everyone having/using a computer posts resume online. And that is the number we are all pondering over. I say between 10% to 20% of this final pool of approx 2 billion users posts their resumes so that brings us to between 200 to 400 million resumes online that are searchable via search engines and deep web searching. Man that sounds like a heck of a pool to go cybersleuthing in! :-)

[Recruiting Animal]

This is like one of those interview questions that test your problem solving ability. Like how many gas stations in Japan. I don't know.

[Norma Beasant, PHR]

CONGRATULATIONS Ruth. You used great analytical thinking to come to your response and you are one of the winners! Good job.

Ruth-Dinaz Sarkari said:

As of June 16, 2010-
trying to do this methodically and there are various options I have not tried but starting with

intitle:resume (and variations thereof like CV, curriculum vitae) and adding -sample and then -~job to clear out junk (to some extent, it will not be perfect) I arrive at about 10.9 - 15 million resumes. Trying to work it further and stuck with Google's "We're sorry...your computer or network may be sending automated queries" message.But basically one should run several iterations of string above and also use
inurl:resume (and variations thereof like CV, curriculum vitae) with similar add ons to remove junk as well filetype:pdf | doc | rtf | docx to generate more results. Then there are those resumes posted on homepages via ISPs that may not necessarily have the word resume or CV in the title or url. There will be some duplication in all of this, no doubt, but we are aiming for a ballpark #.
Thought process - I feel 10-15 million is a bit low considering the world's population (6.8 billion in 2009). A subset of this population is those that have computers (~1 billion)and overlapped with that is a section of the population that does not own but uses the internet (library etc - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet >>As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population uses the services of the Internet.) which is 1.7 billion. So let's make an educated guess that 2 billion people have computers OR use internet in the world. Then the final subset of that would be those that have actually posted their resumes on the web via homepages/personal pages etc. since not everyone having/using a computer posts resume online. And that is the number we are all pondering over. I say between 10% to 20% of this final pool of approx 2 billion users posts their resumes so that brings us to between 200 to 400 million resumes online that are searchable via search engines and deep web searching. Man that sounds like a heck of a pool to go cybersleuthing in! :-)