The Hiring Knot: Untangling Modern Recruiting Challenges

By Matt Baxter and Theo Rokos

The Hiring Knot explores the demands of modern recruiting from the perspective of industry insiders, outsiders and talent acquisition experts and offers practical strategies for overcoming everyday challenges and improving outcomes. Topics covered include navigating hiring trends, recalibrating the recruiter experience, fit versus qualifications, hiring manager influence, diversity and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667854892

Book preview

Foreword: Default to Pretty

There is one unfettering truth in recruiting: everyone loves to hire pretty people! All things being equal: a great education, great experience, etc. A hiring manager will then have to make a selection and choose between an attractive person and an ugly person; 100% of the time, that selection will default to pretty.

Yeah, I know if you’re in HR or Talent Acquisition, you should hate the statement above. How attractive you are should play no role in getting a job, says mostly unattractive people!

The reality of hiring is that we all have hiring preferences. Wait, those are called biases. We have hiring biases. The real issue is that we train our hiring managers to believe bias equals being wrong. When in fact, bias isn’t always bad. Just because you have a preference doesn’t make that preference wrong. Sometimes those preferences help you hire better.

So, the big question is, is hiring someone more attractive than someone else actually wrong? Of course, it is! If that’s the only criteria. Well, unless the primary qualification for the job is being pretty, then, in that case, hiring for pretty would be right! Are you confused yet? Yes, hiring is hard.

Harvard Business Review¹ explained, "As a comprehensive academic review summarized: «Physically attractive individuals are more likely to be interviewed for jobs and hired, they are more likely to advance rapidly in their careers through frequent promotions, and they earn higher wages than unattractive individuals.» Common manifestations of appearance-based discrimination may include bias against obese, oddly dressed, or tattooed candidates, or any people who don’t fit a society’s dominant aesthetic criteria.»

Yeah, but being pretty isn’t a skill! Are you sure?

Every one of us suffers from the halo effect without realizing it. We love to look at an attractive person and believe they are better than us in many ways, from brains to popularity, to overall character. Studies² have even shown that teachers expect better-looking kids to outperform the ugly kids, leading to an almost self-fulling prophecy.

Further studies have shown that more physically attractive people have higher rated communication skills. I mean, who doesn’t like talking to pretty people? And research³ has shown that raising someone’s social skills is a better predictor of lifetime earnings than actually raising their intellectual level.

A 2011 Harvard study⁴ compared women who wore makeup to those who did not and had participants rate the competence of both groups. Across the board, the women wearing makeup were viewed as more attractive, trustworthy, likable, and competent – demonstrating that pretty is better once again!

Yeah, but what about performance, Tim! Being pretty might make people think they’re better, but eventually, they have to do the job!

Okay, what if I told you that good-looking CEOs have better stock returns for their companies than ugly CEOs? Because that is true! Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee⁵ ran the data around the level of CEO attractiveness among publicly traded CEOs and shareholder value. They found that stock prices rose for organizations with attractive CEOs making an appearance on TV.

No matter how you slice it, we love pretty people almost as much as we love celebrities! And we love pretty celebrities. In fact, some people are celebrities because they’re just prettier than everyone else!

Let’s run through a simple workflow on why hiring pretty people will almost always work out well for an employer:

1. Step 1 : Historically, a brilliant, self-motivated man finds a way to be successful. Why did I say, man? Because historically, men had this advantage. Don’t think about the world today. Think about the world one hundred years ago or more.

2. Step 2 : Because of their career and financial success, this successful man, even with below-average looks, will most likely be able to select a much better-looking female mate.

3. Step 3 : Again, think in historical contexts, these two people will have children with all the advantages: money, nutrition, education, and now their mother’s superior appearance genetics.

4. Step 4 : Rinse and repeat. The successful children now grow up with all the above privileges and continue the cycle. Combine superior education, superior appearance, and genetics, superior financial options, and you end up with successful, attractive people running the world.

Do you think this isn’t true? Just look at the history of American presidents or even Fortune 500 CEOs! They are mostly tall, slender, well-educated, wealthy people. From a statical viewpoint, overwhelmingly so!

Of course, this is a simple breakdown of how the world works from a historical context, and it’s wrought with broad prejudices and biases. But all that said, if you are like me and have average looks and average intelligence, it sometimes feels like this is actually how our modern society was formed!

It almost makes you want to go home and punch your average-looking dad right in the face!

Can we agree that hiring pretty people isn’t the worst selection process you can have?

Organizations spend an ungodly number of resources and time building elaborate hiring processes. They break down competency models searching for the exact prerequisites they believe will help make a new hire perform better than one that wasn’t chosen. They build interview decks and create pre-hire assessments based on rigorous science. They check references and build multi-layer interviews and panels.

They do all of this, and still, most organizations’ processes are no better than flipping a coin. The vast majority of organizations go through all of this for a 50/50 proposition. For instance, the former head of HR for Google, Lazlo Bock, in his book, Work Rules, claimed that Google and the hundreds of millions of dollars they spent on their hiring process was only 1% better than a coin flip.

Think about the best organizations you have worked with or would want to work for – now, in your mind, grade these organizations on level of attractiveness. They all rank pretty high on the pretty scale, don’t they?

I’ve done this repeatedly, and the opposite does not hold as often. If you show me ten organizations with below-average looks, overall, of their staff, and I can bet you more than not, those organizations are underperforming!

Why does this play out this way? Could it be because pretty people are just better performers? That my little history lesson in the four steps above is true?

It plays out because pretty, or level of attractiveness, is in the eyes of the beholder. It’s rare to find a mother who will claim their baby