When we talk about the language spoken in the UK, US, India, Australia and other countries around the world, we use the word “English.”
That word is deceptively simple, though. In fact, there are many different types of English.
That refers to regional varieties like Indian English (spoken in India) and UK English (spoken in the United Kingdom), but also to different formal levels, or “registers” of English.
Let’s look at the phrase “employer name,” which often confuses job applicants.
What does “employer name” mean?
Don’t overthink the phrase “employer name.” All it means is the name of your employer. Typically, that’s the name of the company where you work or worked, and not your supervisor or boss. This phrase often appears on employment-related forms and can refer to either your current employer or a previous one. On job application forms, the phrase “employer name” is most likely to appear in your employment history section, where your potential new employer (the place where you’re applying for a job) wants to know where you have worked before.
Understanding the phrase “employer name”
The main point of confusion in the phrase “employer name” comes from the word “employer.”
The “name” part is straightforward. A name is what you call somebody or something. It’s this “somebody or something” part that usually trips people up.
The word “employer” can be interpreted in two ways here. First, it could refer to a company or other organization where you work.
Second, it could refer to your supervisor or boss.
It’s easy to eliminate this confusion.
When someone is asking for your employer name, they want to know the name of the company or organization where you work.
If someone wants to know who your supervisor is (or was), they will instead ask for your supervisor name.
How to respond to “employer name” on a job application
The most common place the phrase “employer name” appears has to be job applications.
In most, if not all, cases, when a job application asks you for an employer name you should put the name of your current employer.
Or, if the application is asking for the employer name for a certain time period, put the name of the place where you worked during that time period.
To make sense of this, it helps to understand how job applications are structured.
Essentially, hiring managers use job applications to get a better idea about candidates’ skills, personalities and employment history.
Because of this, job applications are typically split into sections that may look like those below:
- Personal information – Basic information about the person applying for the job
- Skills – Information about any specific knowledge or skills the person has
- Employment history – A list of previous places the applicant has worked, with contact information and duties from each
- References – Contact information for previous supervisors or others who can provide an evaluation of the candidate
- Contact information – Phone number, email and address for the job applicant
Resumes (also called CVs) are structured in much the same way, although they don’t explicitly include the word “employer name” in most cases.
Employment history and employer names
Within the employment history section of a job application, most systems will ask you for information about your previous and current employers.
One of the pieces of information these systems want to know is the name of your employer.
That means you’ll almost always see “employer name” when you’re filling out a job application.
Just as when the phrase is used in a conversation, the name being asked for here is not the name of a person.
Rather, job applications want to know the name of the organization where you worked.
Examples
“This section of our application form asks for your job history. For each period when you previously held a job, please include the employer name, address and phone number, your job title and responsibilities, how many hours you worked and the number of years you were employed.
If your job titled and responsibilities changed while you were with one employer, create multiple entries under that employer name, as needed.”
This is a dense example, as expected of the type of English used on a formal document like a job application.
The phrase “employer name” appears several times.
First, the text asks the job applicant to include the “employer name,” among other information, for each time period when they were employed.
This simply means to list the name of the organization, business or other place of work where the candidate was employed.
Second, the text says to create more than one entry for each “employer name” if necessary.
What this means is that if you started as a cashier at a store where you worked and eventually became a manager, you would create more than one description for your time at that store.
No matter where or when “employer name” is used, in other words, it’s almost certain to refer to the name of an organization.
If you remember that, the phrase is a lot less confusing.
How to use “employer name” in a sentence
The phrase “employer name” is a noun phrase, with “employer” acting as a modifier on “name.”
You can insert it into a sentence the same way you would any other noun, so long as you’re paying attention to general rules of grammar and the context of the sentence.
An alternative phrasing that is identical in meaning is “name of [subject’s pronoun] employer.”
So if someone asks for “the name of your employer,” they’re asking the same thing as for “your employer name.”
That said, these phrases are almost exclusively used in a business setting. Even there, they are more likely to appear on forms or in an interview than anywhere else.
You’re unlikely to ever hear anyone reference somebody’s “employer name” in casual conversation.
Instead, people might say something like “Where do you work?” or “Who do you work for?”
Examples
These examples are alarming, but both show “employer name” used to refer to somebody’s place of work.
Hey fellow Linguaholics! It’s me, Marcel. I am the proud owner of linguaholic.com. Languages have always been my passion and I have studied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Sinology at the University of Zurich. It is my utmost pleasure to share with all of you guys what I know about languages and linguistics in general.