Ok, I need to preface this article first. This post was originally published by my friend Nick in his Russian blog. It sparkled such a big discussion, so with his permission I decided to translate it and post here for your review.

Have you ever send you resume to the recruiter and never heard back? In situation like this, I always keep wandering if the resume didn’t get through initial screening or the position was already field and no one actually even looked on my resume. Or maybe it went all the way up to the hiring manager and then got tossed.

It also useful to know how fast after reading you resume they contacted you back. Was it a day or a week? To achieve this web bugs can come very handy. First of all, a Web bug is an object that is embedded in a document (page, email, etc) and allows checking that someone has viewed the document. Particularly I am talking about tracking images, which are used widely across the web. The idea is very simple, small usually 1x1 image is place on the page or inside the document and every time image is requested from server, the user information gets recorded. This approach is used by Overture, Google Analytics , Google AdWords, FeedJit, and by almost any visitor counter you see on the web.

So, if they used why can’t we piggy back any of those services to track documents. As an example, let see how we can leverage existing FeedJIT infrastructure and functionality to track Microsoft Word documents.

For those, who don’t know, FeedJIT is a service which let webmasters to track visitor as they arrive on the website.  The main advantage is that FEEDJIT is completely free and you don't even have to register.

Get the code

So first step, get the image. To do so, go to http://feedjit.com/joinimg/ . FeedJIT doesn’t require registration, so you should see your code right away in the following format:

As, you can see they are using dynamically generated image to track users and display the results.

Instrument the document

Secondly, we need to instrument our MS Word document with the tracking image. To do so, copy image source (in the example above it is http://feedjit.com/b/1fd8e5d578f5a423.png ) and insert it into MS Word by clicking insert image button. Note, that you need to insert link to the file, not file itself or there will be no pings to the server.

By default FeedJIT image is 170px wide image, so just resize it to the smaller size. By and large, the Web bug is a widely used legal tool as long as no personal identified information is collected. However, I also always recommend adding some text to notify your resume readers that document is monitored to avoid any ethical questions.

Testing if it is working

Save the document and open it while looking on FeedJIT live feed:

Don’t forget to generate new FEEDJIT code, not to use the one from the example here!

The method above is certainly doesn’t require using FEEDJIT, I took it as a simplest example. You can do same thing with Google Analytics or any other visitor monitoring services. Even better, you can write simple service to do this tracking on your own. Simple ashx service which serves back empty image should be sufficient:

<%@ WebHandler Language="C#" Class="Handler" %> 

using System; 
using System.Web; 
using System.Drawing; 
using System.IO; 
using System.Drawing.Imaging;

public class Handler : IHttpHandler { 
public void ProcessRequest (HttpContext context) {

MemoryStream memStream = new MemoryStream();

Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(1, 1);

bitmap.Save(memStream, ImageFormat.Png);

context.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache); 

context.Response.ContentType = "image/PNG"

memStream.WriteTo(context.Response.OutputStream);

string LogEntry = "Host Address" + context.Request.UserHostAddress + "\r\n" + " Host Name " + context.Request.UserHostName);

//Log the data…

 } 
public bool IsReusable {
get { return false; }
}
}