Woman takes her husband's name after countless interview rejections — and immediately lands a job

Getting hired is often more tedious than the actual process of acquiring a skill. Oftentimes, highly skilled candidates are overlooked due to their ethnicity, race, or disability. Although corporations now emphasize diversity hiring, some still practice discrimination. But have you ever been hired simply because of your name? Sharing one such bizarre instance, a Reddit user came forward on September 24 to share their experience of suddenly getting attention from recruiters after deciding to change their name.

Reddit user u/Nikuniku99 took to the subreddit r/JobHunting and shared her experience with job search after moving to the States. The user revealed that, having had over 10 years of work experience in the tech industry, she hasn't been finding her luck in landing a job for the last 6 months. The user revealed that she had a 'foreign' legal first name, while her last name was short but did not sound 'white.' She lamented not being able to land a job despite carefully researching roles and companies, customizing her resume and cover letter, and reaching out to recruiters and team leads, yet receiving no responses. This left her feeling devastated and increasingly anxious about falling into debt.

However, her husband suggested an idea that left her questioning the discriminatory practices that exist at the hiring stage. He suggested she use his last name, which, according to the Reddit user, sounded 'more white', and also change the spelling of her first name. Having hired candidates herself without regard to race or ethnicity, she believed that a name wouldn't be the reason for her rejections. Turns out, her husband was right. The Reddit user revealed that after she made changes to her name, she soon began receiving interview calls and even attended two. One of them landed her a job!

Although she expressed her happiness over recruiters approaching her, she emphasized her displeasure over the silent discriminatory practices that exist in recruiting processes, suggesting fellow users also do the needful if they were in the same boat as her.

This Reddit user's experience is echoed in the famous study authored by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan in 2004, which conducted a field experiment by sending nearly 5,000 fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. The resumes were randomly assigned either White-sounding names (for example, Emily, John) or African American-sounding names (for example, Lakisha, Jamal). The results revealed that the resumes with White-sounding names received 50% more callbacks for interviews than those with African American-sounding names, even when qualifications were identical. This racial gap in callbacks was consistent across various occupations, industries, and employer sizes.

Soon after the post got the attention of online users, fellow Redditors expressed their views on the issue. u/LPNMP wrote, "Suddenly got better results when I stopped disclosing disability too. I'm so sorry you experienced this, and I hope you don't take it to heart. It made me feel a little less valuable, you know? Good luck in the job hunt!"

u/Smelson_Muntz commented, "That is upsetting, yeah. Now watch their faces drop as you walk through the door, and your modified name doesn't match the face (i.e., you're not... white). Please report back, it would be uber-interesting to hear about the result. What a world we live in. To this, the author u/Nikuniku99 replied, "The funny part? It already happened. The last guy who interviewed me straight-up told me he was surprised to see a non-white person with that name. What's even funnier is that the role I interviewed for was a bilingual position LOL. I'll comment again to share the result!"

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