Is Your Email Address Holding You Back?

Imagine this scenario: A candidate is the perfect fit for a job. She’s polished her resume. She sends it off to the recruiter via email. In a fraction of a second, her email appears in the recruiter’s inbox.

To: Hiring Recruiter

From: crazycatlady75@gmail.com

No matter how good the resume attached to this email is, this candidate has lost serious professionalism points just based on that email address.

Now, even if your email address isn’t that questionable, if it’s anything but some variation of your actual name, it’s probably not doing you any favors if you’re out looking for a job.

That does not mean that you need to go through the extremely painful process of killing your old email address and transferring all of your correspondence to a new one. Just set up a new email address and start using this address for professional correspondence. You can even set up your new professional email address to forward to you current email address, so you only ever have to check your personal email to catch any replies to your resume.

And here are just a few more tips:

• Don’t include the year of your birthdate in the address.
• Do not try to be witty or cute.
• Use a common email provider like Gmail. Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail usually indicate a lack of experience with technology. If you want to go a step further, you can even pay to set up your own domain and email address. Of course, the domain will need to be available, and you’ll still have to follow these same tips.
• Set up a signature line in your email with just your name, address and phone number in plain text (no flashing or colored text, pictures, or witty quotes).

The personal email you use to communicate with professionals should be as close as you can get to Firstname.Lastname@(whatever email service you use).com.