How to prevent making hiring decisions based on looks

How to prevent making hiring decisions based on looks

Your unconscious mind is a speed demon. Research shows that people often form a first impression in a tenth of a second— and then stick to it.

This makes any hiring decision a treacherous tightrope act. In order to stay rational, you must give your conscious mind a chance to weigh in on the hiring decision, while preventing your quick-to-judge unconscious mind from forming a baseless opinion. Unwittingly, far too many hiring managers fall from the tightrope and base their hiring decision on style rather than substance.

Some scholars and lawyers now argue that looks are the last bastion of legal discrimination. And like every form of discrimination, “ appearance discrimination” or “lookism” has nothing to do with competence or ability — yet the unconscious mind often has a hard time reconciling that distinction.

Why do we tend to hire tall CEOs?

Looks have a dramatic effect on some people’s careers. Author Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book “Blink” that, on average, Fortune 500 CE0s are just a shade less than six feet. Given that the average American male is 5’9”, this means that CEOs as a group have about three inches on the rest of their gender.

Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6’2” or taller. Among Gladwell’s CEO sample, 30 percent were 6’2” or taller.

Height obviously isn’t the reason for competence, but why is it such an overwhelmingly powerful factor? Gladwell writes, “Is this a deliberate prejudice? Of course not … Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature.”

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