How a simple resume tweak landed man a job
July 16, 2013, 1:05 pm Yahoo!
Tiny edit leads to surprising success and sparks a massive online debate.
An Australian man says that making a simple tweak to his resume landed him a job.
Kim O'Grady says letting employers know he was a male by appending "Mr." to his name allowed him to get a job after four months of rejections by employers.
O'Grady, a management consultant in Perth, wrote about his experience in a Tumblr blog post on Sunday that has since gone viral, sparking a debate among workplace equality advocates globally.
In the blog, O'Grady describes how he was looking for a job in the late 1990s with years of experience in engineering, sales and other fields behind him.
"I was an experienced guy in an experienced guy's world, this wouldn't be hard," he wrote.
Turned out it wasn't as easy as he had imagined. Nearly four months of rejections later, O'Grady decided to make a change in his applications.
"My first name is Kim. Technically its gender neutral but my experience showed that most people's default setting in the absence of any other clues is to assume Kim is a women's name. And nothing else on my CV identified me as male. At first I thought I was being a little paranoid but engineering, trades, sales and management were all definitely male dominated industries. So I pictured all the managers I had over the years and, forming an amalgam of them in my mind, I read through the document as I imagined they would have. It was like being hit on the head with a big sheet of unbreakable glass ceiling."
Adding the honorific Mr to the CV soon changed everything.
"I made one change that day. I put Mr in front of my name on my CV. It looked a little too formal for my liking but I got an interview for the very next job I applied for. And the one after that. It all happened in a fortnight and the second job was a substantial increase in responsibility over anything I had done before," O'Grady wrote.
In an epilogue about his original blog post, O'Grady writes, "The sad reality is this shows we all know how real and invasive sexism is."
His original post gathered over 2,000 comments and has been republished by Atlantic Media, Quartz, and AOL. It has also featured in news stories on The Daily Mail, The Huffington Post, ABC News in the US.
Mr O'Grady wrote a follow up post commenting on how far and wide the story had spread and how often men knowingly benefit invasive sexism.
"People have expressed sadness, disappointment, anger, but no man or woman has expressed disbelief. I have also not seen a single example of anyone declaring that my story is only relevant to my local experience as an Australian. It's been shared widely throughout the USA, Canada and the UK, and I have even seen a few links from outside the anglosphere. Yet everywhere it is greeted with knowing assent,' he said.
"The sad reality is this shows we all know how real and invasive sexism is. We all know that sexism unnecessarily impacts negatively on women's lives and men benefit from that."
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