Featured Image Credit: Westend61 / Getty
People always say that first impressions count during a job interview, but a shocking scientific study has revealed that employers can base your prospective success on your name alone, leaving many to wonder if that's the reason why they didn't get a call back.
Employers use a wide variety of different techniques to establish whether you're a right fit for the company, from strange coffee cup tricks to deceptively easy questions that have important answers.
However, it might not matter how well you do in the application or interview process if you've got a certain name, as a study conducted by scientists at Carleton University in Canada has revealed the shocking truth that many employers explicitly or unconsciously conform to.
As reported by the Daily Mail, here are the 36 names that are scientifically least likely to get a job:
While it might just be a strange coincidence that the two biggest offenders are names featured in Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5, there are alarming consistencies throughout the list that suggest something is at play with the names themselves.
Advert
For example, nearly half of the top 11 names have the predominant 'Ka' sound, with four out of that five being variants of the name 'Kate' – which is also included.
Lead authors of the study, Dr David Sidhu and Professor Penny Pexman, have outlined in an article on The Conversation that this relates to theories of sound symbolism — particularly the 'bouba/kiki effect'.
This relates to the idea across most languages and cultures that people tend to match the made up word 'bouba' with round shapes and 'kiki' with spiky ones, and this extends to personality traits implicitly associated with certain names.
"Smoother-sounding names like Liam or Noelle were judged as more agreeable and emotional, while spikier-sounding names like Tate or Krista were judged as more extroverted," the authors explained.
Contrastingly, if you have any of these names then you might have a leg up on others when going for a job:
It's not a coincidence that these broadly trend more towards the 'bouba' side of things, with the sounds also leaning towards 'sonarant' consonants (l, m, n) as opposed to the more 'abrupt' voiceless stops of p, t, and k.
Something else that appears to play into things is the socio-demographic cues of certain names, which imply the race and age of the applicant and can become a serious ethical issue with bias.
