Mission Connected · Opinion

The Hiring Industry Needs to Change. Protecting People’s Privacy Comes First.

By F. Jay Hall, Founder, ExecSearches.com

Published November 3, 2026 · Updated November 3, 2026

The hiring industry needs to change how it treats people’s privacy. I believe those of us who build and operate career websites have a responsibility to lead that change.

Since 1999 I have run ExecSearches.com. Along the way I have worked as a recruiter, a career coach and a technologist, and I have watched job boards learn to measure everything a visitor does. Every click, every search, every page read gets recorded, packaged and, too often, shared with companies the visitor never heard of. I decided our websites would not work that way.

Across all our properties, we do not track visitors’ browsing behavior. That covers ExecSearches.com, Nonprofit-Jobs.org, GRC Careers (AI-Governance-Jobs.com and GRCcareers.org), the Nonprofit RFP Work Hub, the GRC RFP & Fractional Work Hub, and Mission Connected, the blog you are reading. No behavioral analytics. No advertising trackers. No retargeting pixels. We do not sell information about what you read or search.

Why? Because a little more information about our visitors is not worth jeopardizing the privacy of our clients and users. And I believe collecting people’s movements around the web and selling that information is unethical.

What we took out, page by page

Saying “we don’t track” is easy. Living up to it meant going through our sites one page at a time. Tracking rarely arrives as a single analytics tag. It comes in through convenience features: a share button that loads a social network’s script, a chat box, an embedded scheduling calendar, a font or image served from someone else’s network. Each one lets an outside company see that you visited.

So we removed them, along with the analytics and the advertising and retargeting tags. Where a social script, a chat widget or an embedded calendar used to sit, there is now a plain link that loads nothing until you choose to click it. We moved our fonts and code libraries onto our own servers so your visit is not reported to anyone else.

Most visits to our sites set no cookie at all. Our network provider can set a short-lived security cookie when traffic looks like an attack or a bot. If you sign in, a sign-in cookie keeps you signed in, and on GRC Careers it stays after you close your browser only if you choose “Remember me on this device.” GRC Careers also sets a language cookie for visitors from countries where we publish in French or Spanish, so we send them to that version once. That is the whole list.

Not tracking you does not mean we know nothing. Our servers keep ordinary logs to keep the sites running and to stop attacks, and a few of our forms use a bot check from our network provider to keep out spam. When you choose to apply, post a job, subscribe to alerts or open an account, we process what you give us to provide that service. No website can promise perfect anonymity or immunity from a security incident, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What we can promise is that we do not follow you, profile you or sell what you do here.

Your career interests are your business

Looking for work can be one of the most sensitive things a person does online. You might be considering leaving an employer who has no idea you are looking. You might be exploring a different profession before you decide anything, or trying to rebuild after losing a job. A search history can reveal a health problem or money trouble.

Most of the executive candidates who come to ExecSearches.com already have jobs. They lead teams and they answer for results. If their search leaks because a website mishandled their data, it can cost them the job they have.

Recruiters and employers deserve confidentiality, too. A search for a new chief executive is often confidential until the board announces it. Researching a role or a hiring need should not end up in someone’s advertising profile or in a data broker’s shadow profile of a job seeker.

People come to us to find work, hire someone, explore career roles or learn something. They have not come to become a product. Visiting a career website does not give that website, or the companies behind its plug-ins, the right to follow you around the internet.

Success should mean people leave

A career business should succeed by helping people reach an outcome. A job seeker finds a role. An employer makes a hire. A recruiter completes a search. If that means someone no longer needs to visit our websites, we have done our job.

That is why I am wary of business models that measure success by how long people stay and how much can be learned about them while they are there. The incentive should be to help someone finish, not to keep them browsing.

Recruiters feel a version of this every day. Too many recruiting systems make the work harder than it needs to be: exports that are hard to get out, data that won’t move cleanly from one system to another, the same candidate typed in twice, firms paying for and maintaining two applicant tracking systems because neither will talk to the other. I believe tools should be judged by how efficiently they let people work, not by how hard they make it to leave. Recruiters should be able to choose effective tools and take their information with them.

AI makes the question bigger

Career sites are adding AI assistants, and that raises a second set of obligations. New York just made the point. Governor Kathy Hochul signed S.9051B on October 28, 2026, restricting unsafe chatbot features for minors starting January 1, 2027. The law’s definition reaches beyond dedicated companion apps, and it carves out some narrowly limited tools, so not every website or AI feature is covered, and not every site needs age verification. I wrote about what New York’s law means for career platforms separately.

Removing advertising trackers and meeting AI-safety duties are separate jobs. Both start the same way: look at how your product actually behaves, including the third-party tools and assistants you embed. Where age checks are required, collect as little as possible, use it only for that purpose and delete it as the law requires.

Ask the question

I am not asking anyone to take my word for how other companies operate. Read their own disclosures. Indeed’s privacy policy says it shares personal data for targeted advertising, treats some of that sharing as a “sale” under state law, and leaves it to you to opt out. Its cookie policy says advertising partners may follow your browsing interests across websites. Compare that with ours.

In all my research, I have yet to find another career website matching this approach. If you know one, show me. I would welcome the company.

Ask every career website you use what it collects, who receives it and why. Ask your technology providers. Ask us.

Here is my challenge to the hiring industry: help people find work and help employers hire, without making surveillance the price of participation. We have shown it can be done.

Ask Indeed if they do.