Job opening: ugly need not apply

We’ve all had the usual post-interview jitters. Waiting in the quiet sitting room after arriving the discretionary five minutes early, you run through a mental list of all your credentials and past experiences you’ll need to bring up to impress. This may include your five years experience with sales, leadership potential and that clever antidote where you single-handedly saved a marketing project from going under.

One qualification that you’ve forgot to list? According to BeautifulPeople.com, that would be your level of attractiveness — the length of your legs and the whiteness of your smile.

This June, the dating site BeautifulPeople.com — where applicants are judged on their looks before they are allowed to set up a profile — announced that they would be adding a job listing service to their website. Here, employers are allowed to freely advertise to the 750,000 “pretty people” that are members of the site to fill open positions, from a music festival video jockey to multiple sale representative listings. Jobs have been posted from all over the world, perhaps offering us a glimmer of hope in the fact that other nationalities share our narcissistic beauty-worshiping.

Besides the obvious “What the hell?” the new business strategy of BeautifulPeople.com had me questioning the effectiveness, and the legality, of this hiring trend. Unfortunately, hiring people based on looks seems to be completely legal in most states. While DC, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco have laws addressing this issue, the federal government has no regulation forbidding hiring discrimination based on attractiveness. While a few cases of look discrimination have been brought up in court, it is still a hazy legal battlefield with no set precedent or federal policy.

This leads to my first question, one that ponders the effectiveness of a hiring practice based solely on looks. Bypassing an immaculate resume for a pretty headshot may work for some professions, and I agree that some roles might even require it (models, exotic dancers, those girls driving the Red Bull car around, etc.). But degree-holding positions requiring analytical and qualified skill sets?

While some pretty people can go through life believing that a bat of their eyelashes and a suggestive wink may be all the qualifications they need to get ahead in their personal life, I believe (and hope) that this reliance would not translate to the professional realm. Sure their looks may help them bypass the lines at clubs, but negotiating a merger or performing neurosurgery? Something tells me that the men and women behind these jobs are looking more at their notes and research than a mirror before they enter a high-stakes situation.

With this in mind, I am not too worried about the addition of BeautifulPeople.com to the job market. Employers will attract who they want to attract, even without this database of “lookers,” as they have done for years before. It all comes down their definition of hiring qualifications and experience. When law schools require your waist size on their applications, that‘s when I’ll start to worry.