His first name was common. His surname was not. It read as ethnic, it was difficult to say, and it was legally his.
He had read the research — the Freakonomics study that sent identical résumés out under different names and counted what came back. The names that sounded white and European got more responses. So he tried it. He put a different surname on his résumé, one that sounded white and European, and sent it out.
It worked. Whatever the résumé had been failing to get, it was getting now.
That was the easy part. The surname on the résumé is not the surname on his documents. Now he is asking what happens at the offer stage: whether he needs a Doing Business As for a last name, whether he should explain the decision to HR, whether the explanation is a sentence a hiring manager can hear without changing the offer.
He has not said what he will tell them. The résumé got him into the room. He is still deciding how much of the rest of it he owes to the room.