After placing your name at the top of the page, the next easiest thing about drafting your resume is adding your contact information. Email, phone, location — you’ve been memorizing this information since your preschool days. Easy, breezy, right? Not so fast. Go back a few keystrokes. Is that really your email address!?
Have you ever thought about what your email address says about you? Our staffing specialists look through resumes all day, everyday and they have seen it all. As a follow up to our last post, What does your voicemail message say about you?, we polled the team again to see what inappropriate or unprofessional email addresses they’ve seen on a resume. Here’s a few examples:
- bootylicious@
- Bigmeech432@
- Anything with “420” in it
- “Snuggle Fritz”
- jerrythegigilo@
- LoyaltyorDie@
It’s important to note that these responses (times 3) came through within 1 hour of sending out the poll. You know how office emails go, normally you don’t get that many replies that fast. But these email addresses were so top of mind that the team shot them right back. Sure left an impression, right? That being said, if one of the few pieces of information you had about a person was their email, and it was one of the above, what would you think about them?
One team member shared a story about how she had to call a candidate to track down an email address and he didn’t want to share it with her. She said he seemed to be very embarrassed and finally shared an address that sounded like it was for a 5 year old girl. The moral of this story is that if you are preparing to apply for jobs, and are embarrassed about saying your email address out loud, create a professional one! It’s free AND easy. What is stopping you?
Another (lucky) team member shared, “Fortunately, I’ve never seen an email address that would give me pause before picking up the phone to recruit him or her. If I ever encountered one that was unprofessional, I would probably pass. This might seem to be a rash judgment, but if that person doesn’t care enough to represent himself in such a way that invites a conversation, it doesn’t say much for him/her as a potential candidate. And, I wouldn’t want to connect that person to our customers.”
Does this make you think twice about your “420allday” email address? You can certainly continue to use that email address to communicate with friends and subscribe to your favorite newsletters, but when it comes to job applications, we recommend creating a professional account. “Emails are important,” another teammate explained, “Candidates should create a separate account for professional endeavors if they don’t want to give up the inappropriate one they’ve been using.” He continued by describing three levels of email types: highly inappropriate, moderately inappropriate, and appropriate for professional correspondence. The list above all fit into the highly inappropriate file. Some moderately inappropriate emails include beallyoucanbe@ or greanbeansandpeas@.
What is recommended for a professional email address? It’s simple. Use some variation of your name or initials. Unless your initials spell out an inappropriate word, using your name is your best bet and won’t hurt your chances of landing a new job.
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