Don’t let your email address speak for you
Natalee Roan
April 22nd, 2009 Something as innocuous as your email address could indeed impact how potential employers see you.
Using “cutesy” addresses based on a hobby, pet’s name or favorite sport or food may be fun with friends and Facebook or twitter but can come off as unprofessional to a recruiter or hiring manager. This goes for the domain name itself (the part after the @). Some recruiters see the use of an unprofessional email address as an indication of immaturity, an inability to separate one’s personal and professional lives, or as a result of sheer laziness or a lack of attention to detail, as in the case of a woman who changed her name when she married and is going by her married name on her resume - but was using an email address with her maiden name.
Besides unprofessional email addresses, there are other "don'ts" to consider:
Email addresses with a year of birth or graduation could tell an employer you’re too young or too old before they’ve even met you. Nonsensical email addresses that appear as a jumble of letters or numbers look like spam when showing up in an inbox and can get deleted before being read. This happened to me when a good friend whom I didn't normally exchange emails with sent me a resume to review - the email address caused me to delete her email. When she told me she sent the document again, I told her that her email address looked like spam. She mentioned that it was an email assigned to her by Comcast. Realizing she couldn't let her Internet provider dictate how she appeared to the world, she now has a shiny new address made up of her name with a few numbers (not a year) through Gmail.
Given email addresses can be had for free, there’s really no excuse for using an unprofessional one in your job search. But it could be a subtle excuse for your resume to move out of contention or for an email from you to wind up accidentally deleted.
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It's in the company's racy
It's in the company's racy ads -- which run mostly in alternative newspapers such as New York's The Village Voice and LA Weekly -- that the line between work and recreational sex at American Apparel begins to blur. Charney takes many of the photos himself, often using company employees as models as well as people he finds on the street. "Meet Melissa," reads one print ad, which pictures a comely brunette in a shower and a see-through shirt. "She won an unofficial wet T-shirt contest held at the American Apparel apartment in Montreal." (The company maintains a string of apartments in the U.S. and Canada to save money on hotel rooms.)70-431 exam questionsIn his marketing, Charney has been adept at weaving his libertarian sexual attitude with his progressive labor practices. But it's another matter to make that attitude a bedrock principle of the workplace. In their sexual harassment suits, two of the women accuse Charney of exposing himself to them. One claims he invited her to masturbate with him and that he ran business meetings at his Los Angeles home wearing close to nothing. Another says he asked her to hire young women with whom he could have sex, Asians preferred.70-649 exam All describe him using foul language in their presence, much of it demeaning to women. Says Keith A. Fink, an attorney for one of the women suing: "The work environment there makes Animal House look like choir practice."Charney says all three women did substandard work and gave no indication before they left that they had felt harassed. Charney says he never engaged in any of the acts of which he is accused. As for his language, he says that's par for the course in the fashion biz. "When I'm working with creative people I use the language of the street," he says. "It can get pretty salty."The suits follow a bizarre article last year in the women's magazine Jane. Charney was described as engaging in oral sex with a female employee and masturbating in front of the reporter.a+ exams Charney doesn't deny taking part in any of the activities described in the article. He says he befriended the writer over the course of the two months it took her to research the piece. "I've never done anything sexual that wasn't consensual," Charney says. The reporter, Claudine Ko, confirmed his take on events to BusinessWeek.Employment attorneys say Charney's language alone could get him into trouble. "You can't force women to be subject to certain conduct on the theory that this is a coarse working environment," says Washington, D.C. employment attorney Bruce A. Fredrickson. As for Charney's admitted "love affairs" with employees, San Francisco attorney Phil Horowitz, chair of the California Employment Lawyers Assn., says: "Any chief executive who's thinking of having sex with subordinates ought to have his head examined."Since the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in 1986 that a hostile work environment was a violation of an employee's civil rights, sexual harassment cases have become a fact of life in American business. According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature can constitute harassment if it's severe or pervasive. It's not illegal for a boss to pursue relationships with underlings, so long as the relationships are welcome. If there's a pattern of promotions or other opportunities granted to employees who engaged in sex with a manager, the employer may be liable for sex discrimination claims from other workers.
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