Do Good Looking People Get the Job? The Ugly Betty Effect

Ugly Betty Plain and Beautiful

Are good looks an advantage to job hunters?  The answer is: It depends according to a recent study from from Ben-Gurion University.  Pictures were attached to resumes.  The resumes with pictures of "attractive" males were nearly 50% more likely to get a call from recruiters compared to "plain" males.  Resumes with no picture garnered the least response.  "It follows that an attractive male needs to send on average five CVs in order to obtain one response, whereas a plain-looking male needs to send 11 for a single response," explains Ze'ev Shtudiner, co-researcher and Ph.D. candidate.

Surprisingly, attractive women were LESS likely than plain women to get a call from recruiters.  "Among female candidates, no-picture females have the highest response rate, 22 percent higher than plain females and 30 percent higher than attractive females. Our findings on penalization of attractive women contradict current psychology and organizational behavior literature on beauty that associate attractiveness, male and female alike, with almost every conceivable positive trait and disposition," explain the authors.  Read the study here