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Here’s an interesting story that relates, in a way, to employment and selection. It’s about two girls who did a bit of a social experiment for a high school class. Both girls looked pretty similar to start with: tall, thin, blonde, and attractive. The hook is that one girl dressed up in preppy clothes that presented a clean-cut and generally “all American” look. Her friend went goth, wearing heavy eyeliner, black clothes, black hair dye, and a bared midriff. See the picture to the right if you need a visual aide.
Then both girls went to apply for jobs as register monkeys at Abercrombie & Fitch, an almost overbearingly trendy and preppy clothing store. I think you can probably see where this is going.
The A&F manager practically stumbled over himself trying to hire Ms. Preppy, despite the fact that the girl said she had no previous retailing experience and no references. I think she may have even said she was mildly retarded and was always being blamed for stealing stuff. Ms. Goth, on the other hand, was treated like a pariah by the (presumably) same A&F manager, despite the fact that this girl said she had worked two retail jobs before and had great references. The girls then repeated the experiment at Hot Topic, a much sluttier vendor of midriffs and miniskirts. The results were reversed, though not quite as drastic.
Of course, this is all utterly unscientific. It’s two girls doing clumsy manipulations on an ill-defined variable and running only two uncontrolled trials. So you aren’t going to see their stunt in the next issue of Journal of Applied Psychology (much to their dispair, I’m sure). Thing is, it doesn’t need to be scientific. There’s already plenty of scientific research showing that you’re more likely to get interviewed or hired the taller you are, the thinner you are, and the more professionally dressed you are. Same for the “like me” effect that makes an interviewer like an interviewee the more similar they are in appearance. So saying that looks really do matter shouldn’t really elicit much more than a resounding “Duh!” from the audience.
But while that may be true, it’s still incredibly easy (and a lot safer) to instead focus on a handful of simple measures to find the occasional diamond in the goth, even for low-level jobs like this. Previous work experience is a no-brainer, and I’d like to slap the A&F manager for completely overlooking this. I don’t put any stock in references (research shows there’s hardly any variance and they have almost no predictive validity), but a few simple interview questions could screen out obvious misfits. If you want to do even better you could add biodata. Even better, cognitive ability and personality tests could be used.
Sure, the retail managers in this story may think that people who look like Ms. Preppy work out better than Ms. Goth, just because that’s the way it is, and they may even have some examples to back this up. But that’s a clumsy hiring practice –measure what you need to measure and nothing else. It’s so easy to do so much better.
In fact, given all that, the funniest part of this story is the “insta-poll” the reporting website was running:
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So, after illustrating the dumb generalizations made by retail managers about skin-deep (heck, not even that; clothes deep) features, which dumb generalization would YOU make, dear reader? Heh.
At any rate, I deal with this kind of “I just KNOW a good employee when I see one” fallacy all the time in the professional world, and it’s alarming to see that it has seeped into our shopping malls. Won’t someone think of the children!
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