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.
Was this article helpful? Sign up for our newsletter to ensure you don't miss other helpful hints!
