Hi! I’m Peter, CEO of Kickresume, and these career-related stories caught my attention this month — and might catch yours too.

As 2023 winds down, chances are your boss has a better grasp on your screen time over the past year than your spouse.

Yes, employee monitoring is a thing now.

The new normal: Eyes everywhere

About eight of the ten largest American companies are keeping an eye on their employees, according to Harvard Business Review.

I'm talking screen recording, keystroke logging, the full nine yards.

Companies have a whole buffet of monitoring tools to choose from. Some offer automated enforcement and safety alerts, others focus on grading your work like a school report card, and a few even try to predict how productive you'll be.

Mobile device management solutions mean your work phone is an open book too. Messages? Yup. App usage? Check. The exact number of times you logged into Twitter during that conference call? Double check.

How over-monitoring undermines work quality

But here's the kicker: Too much monitoring comes with consequences.

Creativity plummets, stress levels soar, and trust is on thin ice.

Also, much of this software focuses on surface-level metrics, such as emails sent or time spent typing, often missing out on deep-dive tasks like brainstorming or strategizing.

Brian Elliott of Slack criticizes this approach for giving a limited view of an employee's contribution:

Simply put, in such an environment employees tend to prioritize emails and messages over more meaningful work.

Employee monitoring turned spy novel

The following examples demonstrate how employee monitoring can go beyond the pale and turn into a total invasion of privacy.

• H&M in Germany took things to a whole new level. Instead of just tracking job performance, they dove headfirst into employees' personal lives, collecting details on family, health, and religion.

• Talking about crossing the line... Ikea in France joined James Bond's club, using elaborate schemes to gather data on employees, including criminal records and bank statements, with the help of private detectives.

• Have you heard about CoStar's recent remote employee monitoring scandal? Imagine unscheduled video calls to check how quickly you answer, what you're wearing, where you are, and even how long you take for breaks.

These cases prove that employee monitoring, be it a productivity precaution or a privacy nightmare, is changing the way we work one click at a time.

So, next time, don't forget to say cheese and wave at the camera.

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Random piece of career advice that actually works

When searching for a job, you should understand your target audience – recruiters. Especially, how they look at candidates’ resumes.

• Do multiple recruiters agree if a candidate is a good fit for a job?

• Will the same recruiter be consistent with their choice when given the same resume twice?

At Kickresume, we set out on a journey to get the answers.

In our recent study, we asked a sample of recruiters to look at over 12,000 pairs of candidate's resumes and job ads. What did we find out?

Want to dive deeper? Check out the press release Study: What If You Showed Recruiters the Same Resume Twice?

Thanks for sticking with me to the end.

Since no great scroller should go unrewarded, here’s a 20% discount code for Kickresume Premium.

Catch you later!

Peter