Any problem with application forms, etc., asking for "telephone number"?

August 18, 2022 2:18 PM

Whether it's in person or on forms I see/hear "What is your cell number?" Is it most of the time when that happens? Is it done on purpose? What is the down side of asking for "telephone" number? If an applicant or a customer gives the landline number, would the company, etc. consider it a lie? By the way, the category I wanted to put it under would have been Employment or Labor relations or something like that. Also I would have put this paragraph in whisper.
posted by nfub to Work & Money (12 answers total)

Best answer: I suspect it's just that cell/mobile phones have become the norm in the USA (presuming you're in that country). According to the CDC, which tracks this, in the second half of 2021 "68.7% of adults and 79.1% of children lived in wireless-only households."

There may be some places that want to be able to send an SMS, which would be a legit reason to ask for a cell phone number (or VOIP that accepts SMS, like Google Voice). However, I'd bet that a fairly large percentage of the 31.3% of adult Americans who have a land line have VOIP, not POTS. I just canceled my own POTS service, because my cell phone is now reliable enough to use even during a power outage.
posted by brianogilvie at 2:35 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Most databases require a phone type so that could be one reason.
posted by rhymedirective at 2:35 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Text. Cannot text to a landline.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 4:11 PM on August 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

Best answer: The company probably isn’t validating the input except for formatting. As long as you enter ten digits (US/North America), you should be able to proceed, and no one will know or care any further.

The company will never manually verify. Either it’s a huge company with a prohibitive number of submissions, in which case it would take forever to go through each number, or it’s a really small company and they don’t have the resources. I saw you said this is an employment situation, so there’s a chance that they’ll call for a legitimate reason and find out, but whatever.

What is the down side of asking for "telephone" number?

Yeah, someone will give you a landline number that nobody monitors, and when they need to reach that person, they won’t be able to. They’re asking for cell specifically because they know people check their cell phones.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:16 PM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The company will never manually verify. Either it’s a huge company with a prohibitive number of submissions, in which case it would take forever to go through each number, or it’s a really small company and they don’t have the resources. I saw you said this is an employment situation, so there’s a chance that they’ll call for a legitimate reason and find out, but whatever.

You can pay Twilio $0.008 to determine whether something is a mobile number if you are so inclined. It's unlikely that a random job application that says "mobile number" is going to bother, but manual verification is certainly not required.
posted by hoyland at 4:25 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I would get a Google Voice number in case they ever check.
posted by kschang at 4:37 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Best answer: What is the down side of asking for "telephone" number?

I'm an office manager, and I run into issues sometimes when filling in forms for the company. They'll ask for "phone number", and I'll enter my office number (non-sms-VOIP "landline"/desk phone). Later, I'll be informed that they're going to send me a text. This happened with the venue for our summer social recently, leading to morning-of panic when I had trouble getting anyone at the venue on the phone. All contact at that point had been over email.

As an office manager, I do not default to entering my cell phone number when doing things for work, and we do not have company-issue cell phones. I appreciate when forms specify mobile/cell number, or at least mention that they're going to send texts. In those cases, I'll either put my cell phone number, or the cell phone number of the employee who is "point of contact" (with permission, of course).
posted by MuChao at 4:43 PM on August 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Typically no one's going to care about whether you're "lying", but there's a decent chance they're going to expect to be able to text you at that number. Depending what you're signing up for, they could be planning to text you something critical like an access code, and giving a non-cell number will eventually lock you out of the something because they can't validate it's you. I think that's less frequent these days, there seems to usually be an alternate option.
posted by Stacey at 6:05 PM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you everyone!!

I clicked best answer to all, just because it's hard to decide on just one. Also I clicked on all as favorites for the same reason.
Stacey I clicked on yours too as favorite but it registers, but it doesn't display how many favorites it just shows [--] (it's actually m dash)

By th way what is the difference between favorite and best answer?
posted by nfub at 1:45 PM on August 28, 2022

There’s a lot of site culture around favorites, but the general idea (at least here on Ask) is that anyone can favorite, but only the Asker can choose the best answer(s). From an Asker’s perspective, it’s six of one, half dozen of the other.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:26 PM on August 28, 2022

One important difference for the Asker: once you mark a "best answer" (or more than one), your question on the front page will have a little check mark indicating it has one. There's no functional change, people can keep reading and answering and you can add more best answers later. But you might get fewer people clicking through to read our question if they see it's already been satisfactorily answered and they want to focus their time on questions that haven't been resolved already. Some people might choose to wait a few hours or days before marking any best answer for that reason.

Also, you'll see if you look at this thread now, the comments you marked "best" get a different visual appearance. In a thread this short it doesn't really matter, but if you'd gotten fifty answers then marking only a few "best" would help highlight those and make it easier for other people to jump right to the most helpful information and not have to read the whole thread.
posted by Stacey at 6:21 PM on August 28, 2022

Response by poster: I see what you mean, thank you!!
posted by nfub at 4:00 PM on August 30, 2022