What’s in a Name?

Some years ago my wife was telling me about some of the amusing – and occasionally embarrassing – email addresses that people had included on their hiring paperwork, and speculating that this would eventually catch up with them over the course of their career. Most of said employees were graduate students at the time, and few of them had much work experience outside of academia. Consequently, most of them had never had occasion to consider if telling your new employer that your email was “HisGoldenLady@whateveritwas.whatever” might have a negative effect on your subsequent career prospects – or, for that matter, on your chances of getting a job in the first place. The problem has always been that given the huge number of email accounts currently in use, and the subjective nature of resume screening at most employers, it has never been completely clear what effect (if any) such email addresses actually have on your career – until now…

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…