With communication about the hiring process primarily taking place through the exchanges of emails or telephone calls, your physical address is not a necessary component of your résumé. Job applicants can get away with simply providing the geographic region in which they reside, including the city and state, and their email address and phone number.
Since your home address is sensitive data, you must carefully weigh the pros and cons of including it on your résumé, and only abide by what you are personally comfortable doing.
Pros Of Including Your Address
It’s Standard Practice
Your résumé is often your first introduction to a company, and first impressions matter, especially when recruiters make a hiring decision within split seconds of looking at your résumé.
Because it is standard practice to include your address on your résumé, it may raise red flags when a candidate leaves it off of the document. An employer may assume the worst, in that you are trying to circumvent the location requirement.
It is all too easy for a hiring manager or human resources professional to bypass a candidate if they believe something is amiss with their résumé. By including it, you can maintain the status quo and move through the process without setting off immediate alarm bells.
Helps Filter Candidates
If your address is not listed on your résumé, an employer’s applicant tracking system may not pick up on your document when filtering through its applicant database. You could lose out on potential opportunities in the present and future, as internal recruiters regularly revisit the company’s candidate pipeline.
Signals That You Are Local
Although an online job posting may indicate that the open role is remote, companies may prefer—and even prioritize—local applicants.
Different states within the country abide by different employment laws, so it is important for an employer to know where you are based. It also provides them with your time zone. If you live within commuting distance of the company’s offices or at least operate in the same time zone, including your address could be beneficial.
Cons Of Including Your Address
Hiring Bias
Depending upon where you live, hiring managers may form preconceived notions about you, making inferences about your social class, income and educational background and denying you opportunities based on personal bias. Leaving off your address from your résumé allows your work experience, skills, education and certifications to speak for itself.
As a young adult, just starting out in my career, I endured blatant location bias when sending out my résumé. After I graduated college, I moved back home while I decided what to do next and where to live.
I mailed my résumé, typed on a heavy, off-white-colored stock paper, one by one to the jobs that looked interesting in the New York TimesNYT Sunday jobs classified section. To my dismay, I was either rejected or didn’t hear back from most companies.
The address listed on my résumé was in Canarsie, Brooklyn, a lower socio-economic neighborhood. It was a rough-and-tumble kind of place, and we were pejoratively viewed as the “bridge and tunnel” type people. All my friend’s parents in Canarsie were low-wage, working-class people. We didn’t personally know any doctors or lawyers and weren’t regaled with any success stories coming out of our neighborhood.
To solve my employment impasse, I decided to pay to have my letters marked with a fancy, upscale location in New York City by purchasing a P.O. box. The résumé wasn’t changed, only the address. Once I did that, I was flooded with interview requests.
If You Aren’t Local, You Won’t Be Considered
If you don’t live within commuting distance of the job you’re applying for, your résumé can get rejected, especially if it is required for the role. In this instance, you can withhold your address from the employer on your résumé, but make it clear in your cover letter that you plan to relocate.
Privacy And Safety Concerns
Disclosing your complete address, phone number, and email address provides a lot of information for scammers and bad actors wanting to steal your identity.
When submitting a résumé directly to an employer through their company site, you can opt to include your address. However, when you upload the document to public job boards, like Indeed and LinkedIn, you can have a version that leaves off your physical address, especially since your profile will provide your geographic region to the employer.
Source: Forbes
