In Germany there are a lot of people who have come from Turkey to work here and eventually decided to stay. Those families have names that sound completely different from German names, and the children of those families sooner or later come across the problem of job hunting with a foreign name.

For people who have “strange” sounding names, job hunting can be really hard I think, because employers who see and read those names might have negative reactions. They would probably doubt whether the person can work as well as German people, or whether the qualities he wrote in his résumé are actually all true.

In reaction to that, German politicians once debated removing the picture from all résumés before they reach the people who decide whom to employ. In doing so they wanted to establish more equality among job-seekers, because they would not be judged based on their (maybe foreign) looks any more. Also the employers would no longer be able to prove their suspicions that the person with a foreign name looked foreign and therefore had to be a foreigner.

Not many people know it but the picture is one of the most important things in a résumé, because it triggers a lot of emotional reactions and completes the impression of the person we are looking at. So the politicians believed that it would be welcomed by everybody if they decided to officially forbid pictures in résumés.

But it had the opposite effect because now the most important thing in a résumé would be your name and that is, in contrast to a picture, something you cannot change as freely as you want. Of course mostly foreign people would have a disadvantage because of that but German people started to worry as well because there are also German names that are most unpopular and trigger negative associations.

In the end the politicians refrained from discussing this topic any further and the process of job hunting did not change. But I think it made many people realize that it is not just your name that counts in the end, but also the picture you send in along with everything else. In fact, it probably has an even bigger impact than the name.

So I think people do not have to change their name in order to get a job but maybe their pictures …

by Julia Lohmann