Ruslan Kogan has a LinkedIn Post (article) titled Don’t hire Hotmail users & other tips to save your company culture. He says that his company created a “good company culture” by doing a number of things, #1 is: DON’T HIRE SOMEONE WITH A HOTMAIL ACCOUNT.
Ouch, says all the hotmail users out there.
He says that they look at the email accounts and use them to “filter the applicants … in a way that ensures someone is the right fit for our organization.” He says “if you have a @hotmail.com account then you’re out.”
Double OUCH.
Note that the comments are not very positive or supporting… here’s the point. Whatever you think about hotmail doesn’t matter. What matters is discrimination and judgement, based on certain variables… and obviously, what tools you use can categorize you as competent or not.
I wrote about this in 2006 here: jason@DontHireMe.com – does it matter?
I also wrote about this last year here: Your Email Address Might Be The Reason You Aren’t Getting Interviews
And here: Email Addresses: The Unintended Personal Branding Message
What email address are YOU using? Is it an email address that is screening you out of your next opportunity?
Well, a lot has been said about “unprofessional” email addresses (e.g. hotbodDD@xxx.com) and I certainly wouldn’t apply for a job at a company using a competing email service (e.g. I wouldn’t apply at Google using a Hotmail account or at Microsoft with Gmail), however unless that is the case I would consider myself much better off being filtered out at any company where they use such an arbitrary and meaningless method of filtering candidates. Seriously, if it has really come to this maybe we should strongly consider eliminating all automated ATS and going back to paper and snail mail.