Michelle Dewberry: society influenced by looks.

How shallow are we! When it comes to hiring staff, Britain’s employers are more concerned with looks than qualifications, according to the results of an ‘under-cover’ social experiment.

Published on 21 August, the covert study by a jobs website reveals that a young, attractive woman posing as a cleaner attracted 16 times more job offers than an older, larger lady despite offering the same qualifications and experience. Similarly, young, attractive female applicants for nanny and personal assistant (PA) jobs both outperformed their older, and arguably less attractive counterparts in sourcing interest, Gumtree.com claims. (Ok it’s the silly season, so we’ll let one spurious survey slip through the net – Ed.)

The experiment posted job advertisements on the site with identical qualifications and different photos and measured the response rate for a variety of positions including a PA, nanny, handyman and cleaner. 

Pretty beats handsome

It also found that a pretty woman tends to do better than a handsome man in the career stakes. A girl handyman beat the stereotypical ‘hunky handyman’ with double the job offers and a young, female PA received five times more replies than an attractive male.

Weight

This image-obsessed outlook is further reinforced by new research today that reveals one third of Brits (32%) acknowledge being influenced by a person’s weight when hiring staff, while 41% of men and 26% of women admit to hiring someone they fancy.

Winner of BBC show The Apprentice, Michelle Dewberry comments: ‘As the evidence from Gumtree suggests, we live in a society that is influenced greatly by a person’s appearance. But looks will only carry you so far so people need to ensure that even if they look the part they need to be able to play the part.’

First impressions

Further findings from the research expose a massive 83% of employers who admit first impressions really influence their decision making when interviewing, suggesting that if someone does not ‘fit in’ they may immediately be rejected.

Gumtree trends analyst Trisha Routledge says: ‘It’s amazing to see from the findings just how much people are influenced by looks when hiring, especially as each job advert was posted with identical qualifications.’

Make skills stand out

She added: ‘It goes to show that in order to succeed in the world of work, candidates need to think more carefully about what other ways they can make their skills stand out.’

Although the research shows that people have a fixed image of how workers should look, the results of the experiment threw up one exception to the norm. A builder, for example, was widely described among those polled as someone with big muscles and a nice smile, like Jason Grimshaw from Coronation Street. Yet when it came to the experiment an older, ‘skinny’ model raked in double the responses than that of the ‘hot’ one. 

The actor who represented the Mr Muscle-type character comments: ‘It goes to show that there are still some people out there who don’t choose a worker purely based on looks, but I believe as a whole someone’s appearance can have a massive effect on their professional career.’

Omnibus research carried out by Redshift among 1,006 adults from 7-9 July 2008. Gumtree.com was created in London in March 2000 and now covers 60 cities across six countries – the UK, and US Ireland, Poland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa It claims to be the UK’s biggest website for local community classifieds including flat share, flat rentals and jobs.

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