It is hard to concentrate when you are distracted and recent research done by Mikki Hebl at Rice University and Juan Madera at the University of Houston has shown that if you have a birth mark, severe acne or acne scars; your chances of landing that much wanted job could be hindered.
That is because the interviewer’s concentration is on the actual blemish or birth mark, which means less of what the applicant is saying is taken in.
“When evaluating applicants in an interview setting, it’s important to remember what they are saying,” Mikki Hebl, a psychology professor at Rice University, said in a university news release. “Our research shows if you recall less information about competent candidates because you are distracted by characteristics on their face, it decreases your overall evaluations of them.”
An experiment was conducted whereby volunteers posing as job seekers had special effects make up to create a blemished or scarred face.
Eye tracking was then used on 170 undergraduate students doing a mock interview on a computer. It showed that the more severe the blemish, the less they heard about what was said; but more importantly, when they were questioned later about the applicant, they recalled less and gave the person a lower rating.
Another experiment was done with 38 experienced managers used to hiring workers. Face to face interviews were arranged whereby the applicants were interviewed one on one. Despite having interviewed many candidates before, the managers were still distracted by facial scars and birthmarks. In fact, they were more distracted and gave an even lower rating than the undergraduates from seeing the facial blemishes first hand.
“The bottom line is that how your face looks can significantly influence the success of an interview,” Hebl said. “There have been many studies showing that specific groups of people are discriminated against in the workplace, but this study takes it a step further, showing why it happens. The allocation of attention away from memory for the interview content explains this.”
Both Hedl and Madera hope that by bringing this research to light, they will be able to raise awareness against this type of discrimination.
Read original article 1 and article 2 here.
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