The story comes to us from the Daily Mail website, which means we have to take it with at least
some amount of salt (the Daily Mail
has had an unfortunate habit of not fact-checking its stories, going back to
before Internet news sites were a thing), but apparently a team of researchers
at a university in Amsterdam have just completed a study where they asked a
group of recruiters to read resumes that were identical except for the “applicant’s”
email address, and comment on how likely they were to select that individual
for an interview. Participants in the study were significantly less likely to
consider a given applicant if their email address included “cute” words or
terms, multiple underscores, or anything else that seemed inappropriate for a
job application. One can only imagine what their reaction might have been to
the terms of endearment, double and triple entendre, or outright sexual
references you occasionally see college students using as personal emails…
Now, we should probably also note that the study involved a
relatively low number of participants, and also found that spelling errors,
formatting errors, or even random changes in font would also have severely
negative impacts on your chances of getting a job interview. But even accepting
that further research to reproduce the results on a much larger scale would be
necessary before we could formulate any hard-and-fast rules about email and
employability, the fact that this study found any significant results at all is
kind of amazing; rather like discovering that a shaggy-dog story you often tell
over a few beers at the pub turns out to have solid scientific support. It
makes me wonder how many of our other funny stories will turn out to be facts
of life in the Internet age – and it brings home to me again that our world is
changing in unexpected ways…
There are people my age, and even younger, who still don’t
really “believe” in email – only use it when they are unable to avoid doing so,
prefer to use voice, fax and even snail-mail whenever possible, and actually
seem to believe that the whole thing will go away again if we all ignore it
hard enough. This is understandable, of course; there have been those who
stubbornly resist every new technology. What is rather more bizarre is that
even people who love email and spend most of their time using a computer
(including some people who grew up online and should really know better) don’t
seem to grasp the inherent vulnerability of information you put online.
Anything you write on the Internet will remain available somewhere no matter
how hard you try to find it and expunge it, and no matter how romantic your
email address seemed when you registered the account, it’s still going to be
available to anyone who tries to communicate with you via email…
And none of this even mentions unfortunate email addresses
created by work-based systems by combining letters of the user’s first and last
names to create something completely obscene – but that is a story for another
day…
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