How recruiters handle cybersecurity threats

Cyberattacks can be catastrophic to any company’s reputation when cybersecurity is breached. It does not only have the potential to damage existing customer relationships, with the threat of losing sensitive personal data, but may also affect future client acquisition.

Every day, recruitment agencies deal with a large volume of data, ranging from internal corporate information to the personal documents of job candidates. The risk of leaving confidential information and employment agreements exposed during a breach makes recruitment companies a major target for cybercriminals intent on stealing sensitive information for financial gain.

Cybercriminals can encrypt the data for ransom, leak personal information about applicants, employees, or clients online, or sell the information to third parties for profit.

Since the recruitment sector has gone digital, it is even more critical for organisations to understand their security risks and strengthen their cybersecurity measures. In this post, we’ll go through the top cybersecurity practices for recruiters to implement.

Top 5 cybersecurity practices for recruiters to implement

Use data encryption

There are various ways to implement Data Loss Prevention (DLP) measures to protect your organisation from cybersecurity attacks. One way to safeguard and secure data on all endpoints is by using data encryption.

Data encryption is a key component of cybersecurity that recruitment firms should not overlook. This process protects crucial information by using unique codes that jumble sensitive data and render it unreadable. Therefore, even if hackers breach the firewall, they will be unable to exploit the code they discover.

This simple yet effective cybersecurity technique may undoubtedly strengthen the secure storage of critical data and reduce the risk of it being accessed by unauthorised individuals.

Install safety nets

Install antivirus and anti-malware software to help protect your company’s website against malware attacks. Antivirus software detects, quarantines, and deletes malicious files, preventing them from entering your system. Anti-malware software identifies and removes new and advanced malware strains from your website.

Additionally, a firewall is a standard software solution that may screen and block the most common methods cybercriminals use to attack your network. A firewall functions as a barrier between your internal network and other networks like the internet, monitors any attempts at unauthorised access, and prevents suspicious traffic from entering your network.

By installing safety nets, you can enhance your first line of security, ensuring that hackers cannot access, delete, or leak sensitive data stored in your computers.

Make backup copies of critical data

You can protect your organisation, workers, and clients by regularly making backup copies of critical business and employee information.

Creating backups of essential recruitment data to external hard drives, cloud storage, or network-attached storage on a regular basis can ensure the data remains available and will not disrupt your company’s workflow even if your system gets attacked and compromised. It is vital that data be easily accessible to the recruiting team since they receive and process a large number of job applications daily.

Moreover, backing up data can save you considerable time, effort, and money needed to recover important information.

Regularly train your employees

Another fundamental element of your cybersecurity strategy is getting more employees involved and training them on how to respond to any system breach promptly and properly. Note that hackers do not typically choose to go after high-level management but rather more vulnerable ones, and this is why staff training is vital to your organisation’s cybersecurity success.

Each of your recruiters should be aware of the basic security procedures to follow whenever they spot any concerns on their computer or database, such as malware injections, network hacking, and phishing attacks. Training your recruitment team to detect and correctly react to issues can significantly mitigate or prevent data breaches.

On a related note, candidates must also avoid disclosing critical information on their resumes. While employment applications need to have all the required data to assess if a candidate is a good match for the company, highly sensitive personal information, such as a Social Security Number (SSN), shouldn’t be on a CV. It helps to get an experienced writer to evaluate your resume and make sure it’s professional and secure.

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Employee Training and Development

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Limit access to data

A security breach places all your organisation’s critical data at risk. One way to reduce the likelihood of a data breach is to establish different access levels for employees with different responsibilities. In most cases, sensitive applicant information should be accessible exclusively to recruiters and upper management.

Passwords should also be a requirement to access any account. Without passwords, anybody may access your employees’ or applicants’ accounts and obtain unlimited access to their data.

By restricting access to data, cybercriminals who manage to breach your network through one of the employee accounts won’t be able to harm all the data on the server as their activities would be limited by the permissions you’ve originally set.

Conclusion

With cybercrimes continuing to grow, it’s crucial for organisations to implement a robust cybersecurity program. There are several strategies recruitment agencies may use to protect their data from attacks and breaches. The more cybersecurity measures you have in place, the lower the risks of your data getting accessed and stolen by cybercriminals.