Want a higher salary? Shorten your name

If you want a higher salary or dream of being CEO, shorten your name.

A new study from TheLadders, an online job searching site, analyzed first name data from their 6 million members. The results? People with shorter names tend to have better salaries and higher-ranking positions. Some of the top five C-level name include Bob and Bill, Cindy and Sarah.

And when it comes to salary, the study says, each additional letter added to your name accounts for a $3,600 drop in annual salary.

But don't worry if you have a long name, shorter nicknames fared better than their longer counterparts. Bill makes more than William and Sara more than Sarah (the one exception was Lawrence instead of Larry).

Though, as Quartz points out, when it comes to CEOs, short names are not commonplace around the world:

In 2011, LinkedIn reported that  American CEOs do often have short names, or nicknames like Peter, Jack or Tony. Elsewhere longer names landed the power position and paychecks: in Europe Wolfgang, Xavier and Charles were among top CEO names and Roberto and Rajiv made the final decisions in Brazil and India. TheLadders’ research is based on US members, though many of them come from all over the world, a spokeswoman said.

Get more stats from the study here.

Photo via The Ladders

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com