Although SeXyKiTtEnAnGeLbAby may be a fun screen name to use among friends, employers won't be laughing.
While work experience, education, and references are information employers rate when they evaluate a resume, a professional e-mail address can affect employers' initial reactions, according to a study conducted by an Ohio University student.
As part of his thesis, Kevin Tamanini, a doctoral candidate in industrial and organizational psychology, focused on the attitude toward different e-mail addresses and how it would affect students looking for a job. Tamanini said the idea surfaced when his advisor, Paula Popovich, a psychology professor, noticed students were sending faculty members e-mails from addresses that were questionable.
They were getting some pretty interesting e-mail names
Tamanini said. A classmate said when people applied in Human Resources people would not consider the account they were using.
Tamanini said he collected e-mail addresses of 200 people, including university professors, and conducted two different studies. One replicated a previous study that researched the perception of someone's given name, but instead he used e-mail addresses. Using the results from this study, Tamanini said he pulled a couple of the e-mail addresses that were professional and unprofessional, and put them on resumes.
I took the resumes that were high and low quality and put the names on there and presented them to people and had them rate the potential candidates based on different criteria Tamanini said, adding that he had the people rate the resume as a whole, and based on the resume, rate the e-mail address.
The criteria the group based their ratings on included degree of professionalism, degree of masculinity, and popular fun, Tamanini said. He said the people with highly professional names were rated higher, even if the resume was of low quality.
Tamanini said he asked the group if they would ask the person back for an interview.
It turned out that the professional name didn't matter
it was based on the quality of the resume
he said. The e-mail name influenced the initial evaluation
but at the end it was based on the quality of the experiences and the quality of the resume.
Leslie Delerme, assistant director of Career Services, said she tells students to use professional-sounding e-mail addresses on resumes because employers do pay attention. She said anything that refers to alcohol or has a sex or drug undertone would be considered inappropriate and unprofessional.
Of course the most important criteria is the content and the relevance to the position you are applying for and grammar and punctuation
but when you are looking at standing out to employers
you wouldn't want to stand out to an employer for the wrong reason
she said, adding that she tells students to use their alias school e-mail address.
Steve Sylven, a spokesman for Monster, said most employers would tend to overlook candidates with e-mail addresses that could be misconstrued as unprofessional.
Anything related to a job you want to keep things on a professional level
from your resume
to your appearance
