4 ways your name can affect your job prospects

4 ways your personenanthroponym can affect your job prospects4 ways your personenname can affect your job prospectsWhats in a name? A lot, according to research. Your name can have a huge influence on your prospects in life. Much of this is due to bias, stereotyping and other rules of thumb that people employ when making judgments about others.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreIn hiring this can be a huge problem. While there are nine characteristics in UK legislation that are protected from discrimination, it is difficult for humans (or even artificial intelligence) to make unbiased judgments. The characteristics that are protected from discrimination include things like your gender, whether or not you have a disability, your race, religion and sexual orientation.But even if you dont disclose behauptung features on your CV, our names can suggest much about us. Here are four ways your name can affect your job prospects1. EthnicityAfter the Race Relations act of 1965, sociologists decided to investigate how common racial discrimination in hiring was. They sent pairs of identical CVs to prospective employers. The only difference was that one used a traditional English name and one used an ethnic name. The white-sounding names received far more favorable responses, despite the fact that they had exactly the same qualifications and experience.This research shows clear racial discrimination against non-native names. And this schrift of research has been repeated over the years, popularised by the book Freakonomics, which featured research from the early 2000s showing how candidates with white-sounding names are favored over those with black-sounding names in the US when applicants have exactly the same qualifications.Sadly, change has been slow, as the same bias was found in research published just last year. It found that minority ethnic applicants in the UK had to send 60% more applications to get a job interview than their white counterparts. For people of Nigerian and Middle Eastern and North African origin it was 80% and 90%, respectively.2. Alphabetical positionThe alphabetical order of your name can also be extremely important in your career prospects. The effects of having a name early in the alphabet likely start in school due to the primacy effect, which is where the first piece of information an individual is presented with retains more importance in their mind. So individuals with names that are ranked earlier in the alphabet, appearing first on registers or marking lists, may be subconsciously treated more favourably by teachers.This may just sound like whining from an academic with a name that appears late in the alphabet, but research shows that surname order influences university selection, academic tenure and even the likelihood of an individual being voted for.3. GenderYour name also signals your gender, in the majority of cases. And if you have a gender-neutral name, you have probably experienced the phenomena of people assuming your gender in email correspondence. Researchers using the same method as racial discrimination studies found evidence of gender discrimination when CVs were identical, differing only in traditionally male and female names.This discrimination cuts both ways. So in jobs that are deemed traditionally more male (such as engineers), men were more likely to get hired. And in jobs that are deemed stereotypically female (such as secretaries), the researchers found that hirers discriminated against male applicants.4. AgeYour name can also suggest your age. When I say the name Agatha or Albert, the image of a person of a particular age is likely to appear in your mind. Similarly, the name Zachary or Zara may bring to mind a different age bracket.Research backs this idea up. When researchers used pairs of CVs that differed in only dates of birth and years of graduation, to apply for j obs where a new graduate was sought, they found a rate of 60% of age discrimination against the older applicant. However, when the researchers applied for more senior, retail manager jobs, they found a rate of 30% discrimination in favour of the older applicants.So while you may hide your date of birth and years of study from your CV, as soon as we use candidates names in selection, we are likely to assume something about their age.Clearly, there is a lot more in a name than we would perhaps first assume. This provides a strong justification for the need to make job application processes more blind, including hiding peoples names because of the characteristics they can infer.Some companies have done this. Some have even gone further, taking CVs out of the equation all together and some orchestras have made their auditions blind to prevent sexism from influencing hiring decisions.But there are many types of jobs, including in academia and journalism, where individuals are hired based on their reputations. Professional reputation is important. Here, we should try and quantify the quality of that reputation, and compare these metrics, rather than judging a job applicant simply by their name.Ricardo Twumasi, Lecturer in Organisational Psychology, University of ManchesterThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people

ASME to Launch Nuclear Engineering Journal

ASME to Launch Nuclear Engineering Journal ASME to Launch Nuclear Engineering Journal ASME to Launch Nuclear Engineering Journal Nuclear power plants currently generate about 14 percent of the worlds electricity. And demand is growing, with new nuclear reactors now under construction in many countries around the globe. ASME is in the process of launching a new journal, the ASME Journal of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science, to help disseminate research from this ever-growing field to nuclear and power engineering specialists in industry, academia and government.Technical papers are now being accepted for publication in the new journal, the first issue of which is expected to be published in the first quarter of 2015. ASME Fellow Igor Pioro, a member of the University of Ontario Institute of Technologys energy systems and nuclear science faculty, is the editor for the new journal. The ASME Journal of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science will feature technical paper s covering a wide sortiment of nuclear-related topics such as nuclear plant operations, maintenance, engineering, modifications and life cycle fusion engineering nuclear fuel and materials radiation protection and nuclear technology applications next generation reactors and advanced reactors nuclear education, public acceptance and related issues and codes, standards, licensing and regulatory issues. Other areas to be addressed by the new journals papers will include thermal hydraulics plant systems, construction, structures and components nuclear safety and security fuel cycle, radioactive waste management and decommissioning computational fluid dynamics and coupled codes reactor physics and transport theory and instrumentation and controls. Authors of journal-quality papers who would like to be considered for publication in the ASME Journal of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science should visit the ASME Journals Digital Submission Site on ASME.org at http//journaltool.asme.or g and choose Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science from the list of journals. If you would like to learn more about the journal or have a question or comment about it contact Dr. Pioro by e-mail at igor.piorouoit.ca.

Board Presidents Resume Spinning a Resume from Web Sources

Board Presidents Resume Spinning a Resume from Web SourcesBoard Presidents Resume Spinning a Resume from Web SourcesAlex Douzet had many online profiles, but no written resume Certified professional resume writer Irene Marshall swept his Web trail to create an effective executive resume.Alex Douzet had no need for a resume in many years. He leise worked at Ladders (the company he helped to found in 2003), he wasnt looking for a job, and his LinkedIn profile was all the career promotion he cared to pursue. But he decided he needed to put together an official resume to represent his career and achievements.Turns out he already had the makings of a resume and so do you and nearly everyone else. Scattered across the Web are the details of your career in bits and bytes that in are the pieces of a comprehensive resume. To an experienced resume writer corporate biographies, alumni sites, countless social network profiles, news coverage of your personal and corporate achievements, even regul atory documents and corporate collateral can comprise a thorough accounting of your professional career.Using your online profiles as semi-raw material can save a lot of time and effort in creating a new resume, but consider it a skeleton, said Irene Marshall, a certified professional resume writer who works with Ladders and helped Douzet fashion a resume. A scattered online presence lacks focus and wont represent who you are or what you can do, she said. It also presents the risk of misrepresenting or embarrassing you.From the about us page at companies you no longer work for to negative news articles and social network sites with embarrassing photos, the data track you left during your high-profile career will not only lead recruiters and kompetenz employers to your gate, it may scare them away.Marshall, an experienced career coach and resume writer who spent four years as a recruiter at Robert Half International before teaming with Ladders, was able to fashion a full resume for D ouzet based on those documents and a brief conversation.The result I look good in that resume, Douzet said. I felt that Irene had done a great job at presenting and positioning my achievements over the past 15 years. Hiring Irene was like hiring a top-tier advertising agency to produce my marketing campaign.Meat on the bonesMarshall began reconstructing Douzets career by reviewing his LinkedIn profile, which she said was detailed but not resume-ready. It served more as a timeline and added some meat to the bones of data she found on the Web, she said.Its often a good idea to write a resume from the bottom up starting with information about education, early career and other information that tends not to change or be drastically restated to show how they apply to a current job search, Marshall said.Whether its your resume or someone elses, you have to know how to ask the right questions, Marshall said. Since the assumption was that the resume should reflect the fruchtwein valuable th ings he does now for Ladders, his role in managing operations was just as important as his role as co-founder.Co-founder and president are two very different roles in a company the strategy was that we had to address both, she said.His profile said he helped establish Ladders. What did you do? I had to ask him. He wrote the business plan and raised $800,000 and then another $7 million. That was good. Did you hire and manage the key staff? Well, yes he did. Thats important.A startup can be two guys in a garage, but when you look at the rapid growth of Ladders, he and Marc (Cenedella, Ladders founder and CEO), must have hired the right people around them, Marshall said. In Silicon Valley, especially during the dotcom crash, you saw a lot of companies coming down because there were all these guys who didnt know how to hire the right people around them.If Douzet had been looking for a job as chief strategy officer or rainmaker for another startup, it would have been more important to fo cus on the ability to put together a credible business plan and raise money, Marshall said. As president, Douzet has the head of every business line reporting to him, responsibility for all the companys 300-plus employees and full profit-and-loss responsibility.Marshall also added Douzets fluency in several languages and his history working in France and England, items she would normally omit or conceal, because they speak to his role directing Ladders expansion in Europe and Asia.A dispassionate eyeThe finished product impressed and even surprised Douzet.Even if I had used tips and guideline for resume writing I could have never produced such a great marketing document on my own, he said.But the true value for the executive was the power of a dispassionate and critical eye on his personal history someone to edit and delete the pieces of his personal history he himself might have been unwilling to dismiss.The key for me is that resume writers are emotionally detached from the produc t they are promoting and therefore can be more objective in positioning yourself and highlighting your main achievements, he said. This resulted in a higher quality resume