<p>After reading tons of posts in which high schoolers are encouraged to study real hard and get into top colleges in order to get a job, I got to wondering if all that is really necessary for those among us (NOT me) who are EXCEPTIONALLY good looking. Does anybody know someone (male or female) who is super hot who’s had a hard time getting a job?</p>
<p>It’s been shown that if there are two applicants (one of average looks and the other of above-average or exceptional looks) and with equal qualifications that the better-looking applicant will score the job. I’m sure there are a ton of lower-qualified beautiful people having difficulty finding a job.</p>
<p>yes I think it is probably the other way around more often too.
Although even if desperate it can be hard for over qualified people to find a job, because the employer assumes that once something else opens up you will be gone like a flash.</p>
<p>Also- while looks can be positively considered, I have had the experience of being hired ( when I was younger) for a job that I was underqualified for, and I quickly realized that it wasn’t my potential, but certain physical attributes that were more interesting to my supervisor( however I was able to transfer out of that dept)</p>
<p>Heh…well, I have one kid whose job prospects factor in her looks! She is an actor!</p>
<p>I’ve done a lot of hiring. Being good looking does help get interviews, male or female. We once dealt with a major firm who had a litigation team that had geeky looking guys doing the prep work for the prototypical graying temple tall suit wearing guy to present. They carried masses of paper and he had a slim attache. It’s rare, however, that someone gets hired because he or she is actually beautiful as opposed to relatively attractive.</p>
<p>I hired a truly stunning admin mostly because she was beautiful. (My feeling is that hiring for many positions is a crap shoot anyway.) Turned out to be one of the best assistants I ever had. But from her perspective, being that good looking was often a negative; she had trouble being accepted for her skills and if she wore clothes that looked good she attracted a lot of attention for that. I did use her beauty to small advantage by having her come into meetings to disrupt some guy’s train of thought. I had many talks with her about toning her wardrobe down to be less sexually appealing. </p>
<p>Not completely on point, but this particular girl - and her beautiful friends - came from working class families and their social world wasn’t at all like what beautiful girls in college might experience. They only met men at clubs because they had high school degrees and maybe some classes at community college. They had distorted images of what they wanted and who they were because genuinely good guys were mostly scared to approach them and they hung out in places like clubs and gyms where that was even less likely. I learned how easy it is for a beautiful girl to fall into abusive relationships - or to value themselves based on the shallow way people treated them. They tended to have more negative self-images than most girls I know, even if it seemed they were confident or even aloof. It’s not easy to be hit on 100 times a day and to expect that from everyone all the time.</p>
<p>It depends on the job, and the country. I had a very beautiful friend that graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering. She had a hard time getting past the first interview, as the interviewing guys had trouble believing she looked like that and was smart. Once they got over her looks, and started asking tough questions, she did ok.</p>
<p>In the 90s I was sent to France to work with a company we had just bought. Despite a roster of girlie sounding names (Therese Marie…) they were all guys. They were shocked I was female. When I asked why they had no female engineers the answer was they didn’t hire them because their productivity would go down because they felt they would have to “chat them up”. I sadly informed them that now they were an American company, and that rule would have to go…</p>
<p>I know it helps… I’ve never had any problem looking for work, and I’m spectacularly beautiful ;)</p>
<p>Timely question. I just spent last evening interviewing 8 college & high school students for a summer teaching job with underprivileged middle school kids. My co-interviewer and I spent 4 hours with these kids. We agreed at the end that the two kids who made the best impression in the first 5 minutes were NOT the ones we wanted to hire at the end of the evening. We ended up with our highest scoring on the kind of geeky, slightly awkward guy that is in attractiveness is about a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. The best “first impressions” were also the two kids who were the most physically attractive. I think if we had interviewed them for half an hour each, instead of watching them as a group for 4 hours, we might not have given the “geeky” good teacher enough of a chance to show his stuff. It seems pretty hard wired in human beings to gravitate to attractive people. Not fair, but this was certainly evidence of it.</p>
<p>Who cares? They’re beautiful; they can’t have everything.</p>
<p>j/k</p>
<p>No, I’ve never had a problem, but thanks for asking! (ba-dump bump)</p>
<p>My D is beautiful and I see the impact beauty has had on her life, both the good and the bad. Job-wise, it is definitely an asset, but socially it is more negative than positive. I am actually surprised by the social encounters she has had since middle school, how strongly other girls in particular react to her looks, quite often negatively.</p>
<p>I have an interesting story. A few weeks after I had my older son, I was contacted by a researcher at a top university who wanted him to participate in a study. When he was about three months old, they placed him in a bouncy seat and showed him a variety of pictures, then recorded his response. I sat in an adjacent room and watched him on a closed circuit television. At one point, they showed him several faces of average-looking people, and then a photo of Christie Brinkley. He either looked away from or stared blankly at the average-looking people, but when Christie’s photo appeared, he started kicking his legs and waving his arms, eyes riveted to the picture. I was really surprised and when I asked the researchers if he was “normal,” they said, “oh yes, almost all of the babies react that way.”</p>
<p>So, it seems that we are hard wired to react favorably to good looking people.</p>
<p>My engineering firm only hires extraordinarily beautiful people. We are encouraged to stay home if we’re not in top form-- we don’t have “sick days,” we have “ugly days,” in case of skin blemishes. </p>
<p>We can flex spend our botox treatments (if, of course, we ever needed any, but we’re gorgeous, so we don’t).</p>
<p>^^^Gourmetmom, I think that’s very true unless you are a middle school girl. Then you see it as competition.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the babies had the same favorable reaction to Christie’s face, regardless if they were male or female. </p>
<p>Mousegray - are you sure the girls treat your daughter poorly because of her looks? Middle school girls can be tough, for sure, but I’ve found that it’s rarely for this reason.</p>
<p>Many beautiful women were hired as sales reps at the companies I used to work for. It helped them get their high heel in the door.</p>
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<p>I always figured I was probably normal. 
You just learn to suppress that as you age.</p>
<p>John Stossel did a piece some years back about this and it was hilarious and revealing. One segment showed two girls with a car problem…one more or less regular looking, and one truly stunning. The differences in how the guys who stopped to help treated them was pretty funny.</p>
<p>Most interesting was that they also looked into how handsome guys were perceived. They had two candidates apply for a financial services job, and the manager (male, middle-aged) who interviewed them couldn’t say enough about the more handsome one. This was even though their reponses in the interview were almost identical.</p>
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<p>Well, she’s now in college and still has to deal with overcoming first impressions. Some girls seem to make certain assumptions about D because of her looks, then after getting to know her, will admit their initial bias. I don’t know why, really. I was being facetious when I said they were afraid of competition.</p>
<p>This is starting to make me feel really dumpy. I was much cuter when I was little.</p>
<p>I read SOMEWHERE about a study that showed that more attractive people had a better chance of getting interviewed/hired, but especially for women, if they were STUNNING, it was tougher for them to get promoted because of their physical attractiveness (harder for them to be taken seriously). The same was not found to be true for males. Sorry, don’t remember the details.</p>