The big job websites will often tell you to upload your CV so the top companies can headhunt you, or they will force you register an account with them and upload your CV just to apply for a job placed on their website. They make it sound like they are providing a great service to you that will help you advance your career. The truth is far from it.
The big job websites make a huge amount of money selling YOUR personal information. Of course, they don't tell you this! Most candidates assume the job websites are making their money by selling advertising - ie. charging companies to place job vacancies on their websites. While it is true they do this, they often provide heavy discounts on their advertised prices. Some websites even allow free posting of job advertisements to help attract more candidates. The big money in online recruitment is made selling access to candidates personal data.
Well, it's hardly the top companies looking to headhunt the best talent. The reality is your personal information is being brought by 1,000s of recruitment agencies and so called "recruitment consultants". Why? It's very simple: if an agency puts your CV on the desk of a hiring company and that company hires you, that agency can get up to 30% (sometimes more) of your first year's salary as their fee! Therefore, agencies are keen to get the very latest candidates to offer their clients.
Online recruitment is driven by agencies recuiring fresh candidates. That is the sole reason you are encouraged to submit your CV online. If the job websites get fresh candidates the agencies will keep on paying to access those candidates. The recruitment agencies are more akin to cold calling salesman than career consultants. They spend all day on the phones trying to match up candidates and vacancies to hopefully cash in. Very little concern is given to the suitability of the candidate to the job by the agencies. Their entire business revolves around subitting as many CVs for as many jobs as possible and hoping one of them gets hired.
Once you have submitted your CV to the job websites, that data is made available to the recruitment agencies. They scour the big job boards, sometimes using automated software, and create their own databases of candidates. They even repost your information on their own websites or internal intranets. It doesn't matter if you remove your personal information from the job website you submitted your CV to, because it will continue to existing in 1,000s of other databases of which you have no control and no guarantee your personal information will be protected. The job websites will claim this doesn't happen and their terms and conditions prohibit their clients (the agencies) from doing this, but the truth is they do it and these terms are just there to provide legal cover to prevent them being sued. The job websites want to keep the agencies happy because they are paying a lot of money each month to access your personal data, so this practice is widespread and largely ignored.
If your CV contains information such as your date of birth, name of the schools you attended, home and mobile phone numbers, marital status, etc, you could become a victim of identity theft if your CV fell in to the wrong hands. How can this happen? Easy - only recently a major job board lost the personal details of millions of candidates to hackers. But it doesn't take a sophisticated hacking attack to get hold of your personal data. Many of the 1000's of agencies that will legally take your personal data from the job websites do not have any protection in place at all - it really is the wild, wild west out there and the protection of your personal information comes a very distant second to making a commission on the placement of a candidate. Based on these facts it's not wise to put your CV out there for just anyone to get hold of.
Some job websites allow full CV searching - that means anyone willing to pay for access is able to search through the personal data contained in millions of CVs. If they happen to search for their own company name it is likely that past and present employees will show up in the results because their company will appear in the employment history. At best, this can be a little embarrassing, but supposing your account of your role or reasons for leaving differs from theirs? What if your current CV contains things you didn't tell your current employer? What if your current employer doesn't like the fact you are looking for another job - will that affect your working relationship or chances of an internal promotion? Do you really want your current employer knowing you are job hunting?
If the website encourages you to upload your CV then they are going to sell access to it - it's that simple. Ignore any BS about them matching you to thousands of jobs - this is just a cover story. All they need to know to match you to a job is the type of job you are looking for, the location you wish to work in, and your salary expectations. They don't need a full CV to do this and as yet there is no technology smart enough to figure these three small details from the texts of millions of CV files all arranged and formatted in different ways - that's why they ask you for this information as well as asking for your CV. If a website forces you to upload a CV through their website just so you can apply for a job you can be sure this is so they can sell your personal data to other employers and recruitment consultants.
Some recruitment consultants don't have clients who need their vacancies filling. Instead, they scour the job websites looking for companies who are advertising directly, then search the candidates they have paid for access to (and in their own collected databases) and contact the hiring company to say they have the "perfect" candidate for them. Sometimes they contact the candidates and say they [already] have a client who is keen to meet them. Other times the candidate is never told their information has been submitted to a company. The hiring company is lead to believe the candidate has been vetted and is known to the agency and the candidate is lead to believe the hiring company has taken specific interest in them. The truth is the agency just matched up a candidate to a job and is hoping to get a fat payout for around ten minutes work. Because the process of matching candidates and jobs is very easy if they have access to databases of candidates, the whole online recruitment industry becomes a numbers game where the agencies are racing to be the first to get the candidates CV infront of a prospective employer. It's not uncommon for the same employer to recieve the same CV from many different agencies - all claiming to know and vouch for the candidate. This can have a very negative impact on that candidates credibility and success of landing the job.