An Email Address That Won't Get You the Job

"Thank you for consideration regarding your recent job opening. Hope to hear from you soon. You can reach me at drunkensquirl@blahblahblah.com"

Yikes! Even I would think twice before making a job offer to a person with an email address like that, unless you were applying for a bartending gig. A recent study found that job candidates with unprofessional e-mail monikers are rated lower by potential employers. Sure, a clever email address will solicit a few laughs among friends, but just don't send a resume from such email account to a potential employer, unless you don't really need a job.

Kevin Tammanini, a doctoral candidate in industrial and organizational psychology at Ohio University, picked 20 email addresses collected from 200 students, then asked them to rate them based on degree of professionalism, degree of masculinity, success, ethical caring, and popularity.

Students, found that alliecat@, bacardigirl@, bighotdaddy@, drunkensquirl@, foxylady@, and gigglez217@ were too unprofessional. On the other hand, mharmon@, jsmith888@ received high ratings for success.

After pairing two professional, and two unprofessional email address, he again asked students to act as entry-level employees screening applicants. Again, students gave applicants with professional email addresses higher rankings regardless of the resume's content.

In an interview with Live Science, Tamanini said, “Even if you get people who have very unprofessional e-mail names and they get through that initial screening, if it comes down to them and somebody else and credentials are the same, you look at other things. This person’s e-mail is 'john smith at yahoo,' and this person’s was 'drunken squirrel.' Which one am I more likely to pick?”

So what have you learned? If you only have one email address, and it happens to have an unprofessional ring to it, just set up another one. It will definitely increase your chances of landing that dream job. But I'm sure you already knew that.

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