Hiring based on Appearance
A new online job board seems to promise better jobs to ATTRACTIVE people. Not modeling jobs, but regular jobs (sales, marketing, etc.). What is this, the 1950s and "Mad Men"? Thoughts???
0
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Hiring based on Appearance.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/13164
This is no surprise to me...people are incredibly superficial and will actually base their judgments of someone mainly on how they look. Anyone can guess that from the way our society values women and men looking a certain way.
At least they're honest.
that does not make it any better
It looks to me like the users are photographers and graphic designers, if the images displayed on the front page are from their site. Photographers, graphic designers, and models (among others) would be much better served by resume sites which included images...
Yeah, a lot of the home page images are of nature photography and the like...I would guess this is for people in creative industries from the looks of it, but I can't seem to browse their postings without first signing up.
Honestly I might use it for my creative resume, only upload a recent illustration rather than a photo of myself...
After seeing the website, that's the conclusion I've come to as well. Or maybe that pigeon is a shoe-in to be the Assistant Editor of the New York Post.
If sex didn't sell then we wouldn't have this problem, but it does, therefore jobs like that require people who can sell anything based on their looks. I use to work at Hooters and they wanted you to remain how you looked when they hired you and they clearly hired you based mostly because of your looks. If you wanted to change something such as your hair colour and what not you had to ask, you couldn't gain or lose weight. I thought that is that crazy at first but then I thought about it and anything I did to enhance or maintain my look from tanning to whitening my teeth or even my gym membership I could write off on my income tax (that's a great benefit). When I worked there I did not find it degrading at all, I had a lot of fun, and I got paid well too. Yeah some customer were inappropriate, and if I wanted them kicked out, they were. The girls working there were respected.
I respect that you enjoyed your job at Hooters and don't think it's wrong for a woman to want to work there or to like working there. However, I don't agree that it's okay that a.) once again the male gaze has been catered to, and b.) teeth whitening and tanning are covered by your job. When they pay for a worker to be tan and have white teeth, they are paying for the image of tan women with white teeth being a standard for attractiveness. Other women who feel they need to achieve this standard or be ugly don't get their tanning and teeth whitening paid for, not to mention how both teeth whitening and tanning are bad for your body. I just can't support an establishment that not only tells men they deserve to look at and objectify hot women while they eat, but also tells men what they should find attractive and women how they should aim to look if they want to be 'attractive.'
Also, a tax write off for tanning is discriminatory.
Think about it - only White, lightskinned East Asian, lightskinned South Asian and lightskinned Latinas would be able to benefit from that.
African American, darkskinned East Asian, darkskinned South Asian and darkskinned Latinas would not.
Beyond that, if employment and job retention decisions are made on the basis of privileging tanned Whites and lightskinned people of color over naturally darkskinned African Americans and other people of color, the impact is clearly discriminatory.
I don't want to judge you for working at Hooters; you have the right to make that decision and I am glad it was not a negative one for you. However, I do have to question how you can call being objectified and judged on your appearance above anything else "respect". Just because you were not allowed to be abused verbally does not mean you were respected.
The link to the article isn't working. I'm wondering what they mean by "attractive." Are they talking about physical biological appearance (e.g., body type, facial features), or are they talking about clothing?
www.coolres.com
Are you saying its only looking for attractive people because its based on uploading photos? That would make sense if all the photos were of people, but a lot of them are nature photography. That means the portrait photography might not even be of the person with the resume, it might be TAKEN by the person with the resume.
I've used the CoolIris app for the iPhone, and it looks just like that site. Its an interface for viewing photography, like from flickr. I think all they've done is used the same design so that people who are looking for a job in photography or design can show off their portfolio-- not photos of themselves (unless maybe they're a model looking for a photographer).
Now, if I missed some spot where it actually says something about attractive people, then I'll take it back. Someone said "at least they're honest" so I'm wondering if I missed a statement like that.
Leaving aside cultural issues (for instance, I am led to believe the standard practice in Japan, say, is to include a photograph in your resume), it is also a well known effect that the more attractive you are, the more favourable an impression you make with people, and the more likely they are to hire you (among other things, I think this review by Morrow http://jom.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/1/45 is supposed to be good, though it is from 1990 (hey, I am not a social scientist), so there may be more recent ones floating around). Short of an interviewer who is completely blind, I suspect you cannot avoid this effect (though it is likely to vary in intensity from interviewer to interviewer, and what different people find attractive has some variations).
Now, you might well say "I do not want to work somewhere where they hire people based on appearence.", which is certainly a legitimate way to feel, but there is a huge difference between setting out to hire people based on how nice looking they are, and a place where those deciding who to hire are subject to the same unconscious pro-beauty bias as the rest of us; while one can avoid the former, I suspect you just can not avoid the latter, unless you are self-employed or unemployed.
In the eternal quest to make your resume stand out (and there are excellent reasons to do this, if you have ever seen a stack of resumes being cut down, you may know some), it is not surprising that people would want to do something to get their toenail in the door.
Brian,
"Attractive" is subjective.
Depending on your race, country of origin and culture, and just plain personal preference, "attractive" can have a totally different meaning for different people.
Why should something as life and death important as an individual's livelihood be dependent on a personnel manager's subjective idea of 'beauty'?
You're idea of a "nice looking" woman and mine might be totally different - so why should somebody's ability to pay their rent and feed their kids be based on what they look like?
That's flat out discriminatory!
Greg
Yes, it is discriminatory. I do not think anyone is disputing this. If I am disputing this, I am not aware of it. But a quick review of the literature shows pretty clearly that the more attractive I find someone, the smarter I will think they are, the more hardworking, whatever. I will do it without ever realising I am thinking this way. While one can advocate educating people about this effect to lessen it, a job interview is not the place I would choose to do it (unless I really wanted to not get the job).
Beyond that, we can easily devise some objective standards for beauty in this context. I could take an integral over people of (how attractive they find me) and divide by an integral over people of (1), or take the numerator to be (how attractive they find me) multiplied by (how much influence they have on my life) or whatnot. That there is some variation in how attractive different people find me, I can still take some sensible average over it to understand how it affects my life on the aggregate, or evaluate it situation by situation (in practice, I realise this is a difficult thing to measure, but as a purely hypothetical exercise, it seems fine).