One of the issues we covered during last week’s ‘training the trainer’ Networking for Work webinars was the importance of having a professional-sounding email address – so something plain and simple (e.g. ‘firstname_surname@gmail.com’) rather than something so quirky or playful that it may well put potential employers off (e.g. ‘kingofclubs84@yahoo.com’).
We used our Email Address Scorecard to illustrate this and the trainers we spoke to agreed that when it came to job-hunting, a nice and simple email address is always best. But something that did cause some debate was the scorecard’s higher ranking of an email address from Gmail or a personalised domain, above email addresses from other webmail providers such as Hotmail, AOL or Yahoo.
The reasoning for this came from the likes of Barry Graubart, who in his post Five Things to Avoid When Job Hunting Online, said that even this can influence some employers, especially when applying for positions that require a good level of computer literacy:
If it’s an AOL address, it says you’re not a very sophisticated technology user. That’s fine for some positions… Even a Yahoo or Hotmail address makes me think of a teenager rather than a serious business professional. If you have your own domain, that’s great. Otherwise, get a Gmail account. It’s free and it looks professional.
Some webinar attendees agreed that there is a kind of ‘snobbery’ over webmail providers whilst others disagreed, and said that as long as the name of the email address was professional-sounding it didn’t matter what service was being used. What do you think? Let us know in the comments box below if you have any thoughts on this.
Introducing some comedy to the debate is The Oatmeal with the tongue-in-cheek comic What your email address says about your computer skills:
