Worker Suddenly Starts Getting Job Interviews After 6 Months Of Rejections Because She Changed Her Name
The response was shocking.
PeopleImages | Shutterstock The job market is abysmal, but one worker found that the reason for her lack of interviews was more nefarious than just an oversaturated market. In a post on Reddit, she explained that she changed her "foreign" name on her resume to something more "white-sounding," and she suddenly started getting interviews.
When you spend hours upon hours every day for months sending out resumes into the abyss, it's easy to start feeling like YOU, not the system, are the problem. But after a ceaseless dry spell, this worker said she became suspicious and decided to experiment with one small targeted resume change to see if it would make a difference. It did make a difference, and the change was swift and shocking.
A worker suddenly started getting job interviews by changing her 'foreign' name.
fizkes | Shutterstock
In a Reddit post, the worker explained that she had already been using a nickname instead of her "foreign" first name, because her last name is "very short" and "easy to pronounce." That should have done the trick, right?
But short and easy to pronounce as it is, her surname is also "not 'white.'" It is obviously a name from a culture viewed as being outside of America. It had never been a problem in her 10-year career before, so she thought nothing of it.
But now she lives in the States, where, of course, things are very different when it comes to these issues, especially nowadays. "I knew discrimination existed in hiring, but I honestly thought it wouldn’t affect me," she wrote. "I had hired people myself and never cared about names or ethnicity. Silly me."
After six months of getting nowhere, taking her husband's 'white' last name changed everything.
"I spent about 6 months applying to jobs," she went on to explain. "I either got a rejection email without a single interview or got ghosted." She focused on "quality, not quantity" making sure she did her research, packaged herself properly, and even enlisting professional help with her resume and cover letters.
Still, nothing, even after applying to more than 150 jobs, working connections and reaching out directly to hiring managers and other more senior staff on LinkedIn. "I felt devastated, worthless, and started worrying about debt just to survive," she wrote.
Then her husband suggested she spell her first name differently and take on his "white-sounding" surname on her resume and LinkedIn profile, and even created a new email address with this name. It only took a single week for her to get two interviews, one of which has led her to the final decision point for a job. "Nothing else changed," she wrote, "just my name."
Discrimination in hiring like this is very common, and some say AI tools are making it worse.
"I’m glad I’m finally getting interviews… but seeing such a stark difference so quickly is shocking," she wrote. "It’s a bitter feeling." She is absolutely not alone, however.
In the early 2000s, a major study found that candidates with names like "Emily" and "Greg" were 50% more likely to get a call from a resume submission than candidates named "Lakisha" or "Jamal," even if all other details were equal.
Twenty years later, those rates of discrimination have gotten better, but are still shockingly prevalent. A 2024 study from the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley found that presumably white candidates got called back between 9% and 24% more often than presumably Black ones.
And now with the increasing integration of AI into the hiring process, it seems to be getting worse. Studies have found that AI systems within recruiting, such as those used for applicant-tracking and interviews, frequently misread things like speaking accents and facial expressions and penalize candidates accordingly. Unsurprisingly, AI tools struggle with these elements with non-white candidates far more often.
AI recruiting systems have also been found to take trends within a company's staffing as cues it should replicate, like a now infamous mishap at Amazon in which the system's AI tool noticed the company's dearth of female employees and took it to mean it should avoid hiring women.
It's not hard to imagine AI tools making a similar miscalculation on names, making the already existing problem with name bias even worse. Sad as it is, this woman's trick is probably good advice in our increasingly dystopian job market. "Very sad to experience this first-hand," she wrote. "[but] if your name sounds 'foreign,' try changing it."
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
