bizMe

What’s in a Name?

For those of us who are still clambering up the rungs of our chosen career ladder, our potential employability is a prime concern. We pick apart the job ads, doing our best to convince ourselves that when a recruiter writes “must have a degree in retail management” what they really mean is “must own too many shoes”. We tweak our CVs so thoroughly that we forget which bits are fictitious, and we spend hours informing our bathroom mirror that that mid-degree future-panic gap year we took from university was actually a valuable real world learning experience.

But what if, as much as we downplay our faults, as much as we enthuse about our strengths, and as much as we schmooze at every given opportunity, our chances of getting our dream job offer are being jeopardized . . . and by somebody who doesn’t even know that they’re doing it?

You see, a few days ago I was reading an article about the latest advance in interview shortlisting. Forget time-consuming psychometric testing, these days, faced with enormous piles of almost identical application forms, HR professionals are apparently typing candidates’ names into Internet search engines and seeing what appears.

Which is all very well if you’ve got a needle in a haystack name like Mary Smith of London—the chances of anybody realising that you’re that Mary Smith of London are happily low.

It’s not a problem if you’re a devoted fan of pseudonyms, or you’ve never seen the appeal of joining MySpace.

And it shouldn’t be a problem for me; type my rather distinctive real name into a search engine and the only references you’ll find to me are freelance film reviews, professional publications and the odd bland genealogy site.

But you’ll also get this: hiya peepz every 1 sez im crazy lol i diny hink say lol i have da best bf n he is top dog like lol luv yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaz xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Yes, that’s right, you get the Bebo page of a girl of about the same age as me, from around the same area as me, with a bad habit of sitting on the Internet when she’s supposed to be at work, and not enough common sense to use a false name while she does so.

I flew into a minor panic when I found her page. What if potential employers think that she is me? What if HR departments assume that I waste my whole day on the Internet? What if editors won’t commission my work for fear of me ending every sentence with multiple kisses? What can I do?

For a brief moment I thought about emailing her: Did you know that we’re the only two Sarah Mxxxxxxxs in the world? And that your grammatical incompetence is costing me my future? But the chances of her doing anything other than forwarding my message to her top dog boyfriend with the remark “lol” were slim to non-existent.

I considered heading my CV with the statement: I swear that’s not my Bebo page. But if anything’s more off-putting to employers than an inappropriate internet habit it’s unnecessary neuroticism.

And I toyed with changing my name by deed poll. Possibly to one shared by somebody mildly successful within my intended field.

But finally I accepted that the best thing I could do was to just keep going, to let my hard work speak for itself, to earn myself references and recommendations, and to not pause to worry about the social networking habits of my namesake.

All of which would have been fine, had my boss not caught me emailing exactly those sentiments to every non-work contact in my address book in the middle of the afternoon.