Slashdot Mirror
Is Your Email Address Holding You Back? (wsj.com)
Whether you're freelancing or on the job hunt, don't let a poorly conceived online handle limit your career prospects A quick glance at any group email confirms what recruiters and hiring managers know too well: Not everyone sheds their adolescent email addresses when they enter adulthood, instead maintaining allegiance to digital monikers based on the music, videogames and contraband they once held dear. From a report: Though rebranding yourself online can be a pain (as those who've been through the ordeal of changing their contact info know), the practice is often better for your career trajectory, said Chris Swanson, a career and college counselor at Bremerton High School in Washington state. "It's just like the idea that a handshake and eye contact makes a good impression. That's the first thing that comes across someone's desk." Even so, many Americans still use curious handles for professional exchanges, either by virtue of inertia or nostalgia or because they've never had an employer-issued handle and don't know any better -- they only know Dave Matthews rules.
[...] It might be ironic to send missives from @aol.com, but it doesn't suggest an exceedingly tech-savvy candidate. Actually, "It weirds me out," said Ms. Moore. "Why are you still using AOL? Gmail is definitely the winner." Don't even get her started on Hotmail. When updating a resume it's a good time to evaluate if an email address seems dated, especially if applying for a tech gig.
[...] It might be ironic to send missives from @aol.com, but it doesn't suggest an exceedingly tech-savvy candidate. Actually, "It weirds me out," said Ms. Moore. "Why are you still using AOL? Gmail is definitely the winner." Don't even get her started on Hotmail. When updating a resume it's a good time to evaluate if an email address seems dated, especially if applying for a tech gig.
If you're (say) enrolled in grad school part-time, use your university address. This provides automagic proof that you're in fact enrolled -- one less thing on their resume for them to need to check.
If someone is still using an AOL email address, so what? I know of several successful business which use AOL addresses.
People like Ms. Moore who are "weirded out" by what email domain people use are the problem, not the people applying for positions. Thinking the latest and greatest is the only thing which matters has brought us the abomination which is Windows 10 or the nearly walled and welded garden of Apple.
If these people are more worried about what email address someone uses rather than their qualifications, that explains the sorry state of affairs in the tech industry today. Flash over substance.
Run your own mailserver. DNS registration is cheap these days, and you can have as many different email addresses as you want.
Recruiters, being whom and what they are, are less likely to think
I deleted the extra words you put at the end for you.
I've seen fairly innocuous ones that are nonetheless unique, and a quick Google search shows these people are {furries, swingers, potheads, anarchists, involved in political groups who actively oppose our line of work, survivalists, conspiracy theorists}. In general, we try to evaluate talent. If you're applying for a niche or high-end position, we'll likely look at your ... hobby ... as a novelty.
However, if you're applying for something more entry level, at the very least we will question your judgement. At worst, we might think you're a little too weird.
Ever not hired someone because of their email? Nope. Several on the above list I remember because I was all 'I can't believe I hired Bradalicious!'. It is hard, though, when forming a culture fit assessment to exclude such impressions, for good or bad.
Also, it's fun to state sometimes the background company contacts via email, is 'analrapelover1972@yahoo.com' still a good email?
A gmail address only tells me that you don't mind Google parsing your emails and collating data on you. I'm not sure why an employer would want that but they don't seem to mind too much themselves.
I work and have worked with some well known and / or high net worth individuals, and more often then not they have an AOL address, as they started using it in the 90s and just just kept using it as they were comfortable with it, and no one ever gave them a good enough reason to switch. (these are obviously not tech industry people)
For myself I did go by a childhood nickname for many many years and it actually stuck in the workplace because I have a very common first name and we had to deconflict.
Now that I work for myself I have dropped it, and I use my personal domain with POP/IMAP on a hosting server with my website, keeping only two weeks of email on the server. Like some people here I'm not interested in having all my email exposed to the Google apparatus.
It'd be interesting to see in what light personal domains are seen in now, not that it matters or affects me at this point. (firstnamelastname.com type format) Before it was a must have piece of real estate, now many people just use a free email service such as Gmail and few people have personal websites anymore.
My wife still uses an AOL email address... and why the hell not?
It still works just fine; nobody has a problem reaching her - she hasn't had to make anyone change an address book in 20+ years.
She connects to it via IMAP with a real mail client, and has been doing so for at least the last 15 years, and POP3 before that.
Having an @aol.com address has zero reflection on function, form, appearance or anything else of her email... it's, after all, "just" an IMAP server. No reason to change whatsoever. What's the benefit? Believe it or not, the AOL IMAP servers are pretty stable - no more or less so than any other service. So, no technical or feature upside to doing so.... Why go through the hassle of changing?
I have been keen to do this for a while now, but have always assumed it would be a total hassle with the whole whitelist/blacklist thing.
Does it in fact wind up being a lot of work, or should I jump right in?
job hunting purposes and never use it elsewhere. If you do, you'll find that your professional email will land on a zillion of spam lists and you'll be bothered by recruiters even years after securing a job. By keeping it separate, recruiters also won't be able to find your profiles on the Internet and possibly jeopardise your application efforts.
The reality is that is pure ignorance on the interviewers part, having ancient email addresses connected to those domains often means a long history of involvement with internet, I literally only just ditched an ISP account I had used for nearly 30 years. I do many interviews and not once have I ever given a shit about their email address. However nowadays the ignorance of some interviewers probably does need to be catered for, doesn't mean you have to change anything though, just register a new domain/email address just for those situations. If you are reliant on your domain name and email address to obtain an interview you have other serious problems anyway.
And I couldn't give less of a toss what the email address is.
My job is to match skillsets and personality to a role. Before sending a CV on to a company I strip contact details anyway. So the hiring company doesn't have that as a baseline. And if there is an email that I think will cost the person I advise them to create another one.
But the recommendation to change it never comes on the 2nd half of the email address. It's always the first. @aol, @hotmail, @rediffmail, who cares? Bigknockersgg@gmail.com got advised to use a different one because she was going for an HR role and the company would have to send the offer letter there.
Seriously who knows what setup people have behind the scenes anyway. An @aol might be in use simply because it is the email address that they have been giving people for the last 20 years. It could potentially all being forwards to a Gmail account anyway.
A thing to remember about High Tech is that there is enormous value added.
As a result, company management can be off-the-wall-fruitcakes, following or instituting management fads and perpetrating many horrible management pathologies, yet still have enough profit left that the company can go on for years before dying, or even thrive.
Then, even if they take it down (or better yet, bail out just before their house of cards collapses), or a competitor with less pathology eats their lunch, failure in High Tech is so often not the fault of the failing that it's not a black mark. Unless how they screwed up is SO visible that it becomes a scandal (or sometimes even if it is) they can then use their experience as a qualification credit when going for their next job, beat out less pathological but more junior applicants, apply the same or even bigger and better pathologies to another, larger, company, and take it down, too. Iterate for a while and you have a successful career, are rich from cashed-in stock options, and leave a trail of devastation as a legacy.
What's true for upper management goes double for middle management and functionaries. They get to inherit both the pathologies of those above them and create more or follow fads of their own. As lower-ranking they're expected to be less competent and their foul-ups are not the subject of major business-press scandal.
Minsky divided the first three decades of computer science education into three periods of about a decade each:
1) Computer science was too new. Colleges had no idea what to teach, so they taught the wrong stuff. (Like everybody was taught how to WRITE a compiler.) A four-year degree was actually a handicap for getting a job in industry: It meant you had more that you had to UN-learn before you could learn the stuff you actually needed to know to be useful. The trick was to go ALMOST to a degree (to get access to the tools to learn and the useful skills), then get a job and drop out.
2) Colleges figured out enough about what was really needed that going all the way to a four-year degree actually made you more useful than not.
3) Colleges got into teaching a bunch of computer-science methodology fads and the degree became a slight handicap again.
There have been a few more decades since then, and a lot more fads, both in computer science and in management. About a decade back, for instance, a degree was a mandatory check-box, and no matter how experienced you were, how many patents you had, who you knew, or how hard the people running the actual department were crying for you to be hired, you couldn't get HR to process your paper without having the sheepskin, checking the box, and filling in the adjacent slot with the name of one of a handful of big-name schools.
On one hand some big-name companies are again hiring by some measure of skill and not requiring degrees, a practice that might spread. (Especially if H1Bs get restricted.) On the other, we've got the "email provider is A SIGN" fad in H.R. circles. So here we go again.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A gmail.com address can also that you wanted a stable, long-term email address with high availability and good spam filtering, and fewer political implications than most addresses.
Recruiter = Person who still applies to work in a job that was replaced by computers 25 years ago and they didn't actually notice
I have a simple response to recruiters when they say :
Them : I have a great customer...
Me : No, you don't. They left it up to a relative stranger to track down leads instead of searching LinkedIn or Monster or whatever else. You have a customer who doesn't actually care enough to use Google.
Them : I have a great opportunity for you...
Me : No you don't. Companies don't use recruiters when they want serious candidates, they use recruiters when they are looking for meat. They get their serious candidates through personal networking and personal recommendations. You would never hire a candidate for a "Great opportunity" through something as anonymous as a recruiter.
Them : We're hiring 17 great people for a project...
Me : Good luck! You're attempting to build a team without any real knowledge of how they will work together as a team. You're actually throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some will stick. If you're hiring 17 more or less random people for a project, most of those people are basically just desperate and if I were there, I'd have to do all their jobs for them. You'd be better off hiring two or three known assets and have them bring their own people in. In reality, if you're hiring 17 people at once, you should actually be outsourcing the project.
There are many things to say to recruiters... my dad was a recruiter back before the Internet. Back then, to look at jobs outside of your local area, it was the only way to go. Once the web came around, recruiters were basically people who couldn't find a real job for themselves and now are trying to do it for someone else.
Them : I have a great customer...
Me : No, you don't. They left it up to a relative stranger to track down leads instead of searching LinkedIn or Monster or whatever else. You have a customer who doesn't actually care enough to use Google.
When I wanted to relocate (family reasons), I didn't have any contacts in the area I wanted to relocate to -- I worked with a great recruiter and had an interview scheduled for my current job before the job was even posted on the job boards.
Them : I have a great opportunity for you...
Me : No you don't. Companies don't use recruiters when they want serious candidates, they use recruiters when they are looking for meat. They get their serious candidates through personal networking and personal recommendations. You would never hire a candidate for a "Great opportunity" through something as anonymous as a recruiter.
When my company needed to grow, we quickly ran out of personal recommendations and though we posted to the usual places, sifting through the hundreds of unqualified resumes got to be a chore. The company had worked with a recruiter off and on for over 10 years, and she sourced us some great candidates (including me).
Recruiters are kind of like travel agents -- you don't always need one, but when you do, a good one is worth their weight in gold.
Them : I have a great customer... Me : No, you don't. They left it up to a relative stranger to track down leads instead of searching LinkedIn or Monster or whatever else. You have a customer who doesn't actually care enough to use Google.
Alternatively, I have a team of 4 developers (including me) and our hr person is basically just a part time employee that processes payroll. I have neither the time or the aptitude to spend days trawling through LinkedIn or whatever you think I should be doing with my time instead of building my product. However I have a reasonable amount of cash and I'm willing to pay someone else to do the web trawling.
Them : I have a great opportunity for you... Me : No you don't. Companies don't use recruiters when they want serious candidates, they use recruiters when they are looking for meat. They get their serious candidates through personal networking and personal recommendations. You would never hire a candidate for a "Great opportunity" through something as anonymous as a recruiter.
In an ideal world, absolutely. Certainly, most of the best candidates I've interviewed were people I've interviewed from hackernews. However, the worst CVs were also from there. In my experience, you want to give yourself the best openings to get the right candidate and that means recommendations, meet ups, hackernews and recruiters.
Them : We're hiring 17 great people for a project... Me : Good luck! You're attempting to build a team without any real knowledge of how they will work together as a team. You're actually throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some will stick. If you're hiring 17 more or less random people for a project, most of those people are basically just desperate and if I were there, I'd have to do all their jobs for them. You'd be better off hiring two or three known assets and have them bring their own people in. In reality, if you're hiring 17 people at once, you should actually be outsourcing the project.
Any project that starts with hiring 17 people will probably never get delivered. A lot of these kind of postings, at least where I live (London), are for contract bodies at banks, which is generally well-paid but incredibly boring maintenance work, so take that or leave it
One of the problems with your theory that you should be able to build a large team from recommendations is this though. I have a team of 3 other people. They are the best people I have worked with over the last 3 or 4 years - that is why I brought them in. Who are they going to have worked with in that period that is outside of the same group? You need a way of bringing in new blood