Grooming Your Way to the Top

By Frank Mulligan ñ Accetis International, Talent Software & Recruit China

If you reject the whole Casual Monday to Casual Friday culture that appears to have infected much of the business world, you will be pleased to hear that recent research shows that your appearance has an enormous impact on the amount of money you earn, and by implication, the rate of development of your career.

The results are consistent across cultures around the world, and include China.

So itís not what you know about your industry but whether you can carry off Gucci and Prada. Mixed with LíOreal and Old Spice maybe. The clothes you wear, and the quality of your grooming, are career tools too.

The effect is stronger for men than women but for both sexes it would appear that the better looking you are the better your career will be. So the Halo Effect is even stronger than originally thought. Those who start off looking better can get more out of their grooming than those who look like something the cat dragged in.

For those of us in HR these results feel disturbing.

We believe that our efforts to hire and retain good people are based on the notion that we can get a real understanding of their underlying talent, and then communicate that information to managers and colleagues in our organisation.

If we are communicating this information to people who have little understanding of the depth of others, and who rely on shallow information about appearances to inform them about otherís abilities, then all our efforts are in vain. We may even suffer from this problem ourselves, without actually knowing it.

The negative interpretation of this is that the circus performance we see at interview is followed by a model show in the office and another circus performance during the annual performance review. Out of the office we build our profiles on Linkedin and Facebook, and project what we want others to believe about us. After a while we all begin to believe our own baloney and our focus is on our personal 15 Minutes of Fame.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

The positivist view is that the additional efforts involved in combing your hair and shining your shoes is a measure of personal commitment to the office, and to work in general.

Think of it in terms of your first date with someone you really want to go out with. How much effort do you make? Now compare that with the effort you might make to meet one of your ëmatesí for a quick drink at a local bar. Dress sloppily in the office and you are saying that you simply canít be bothered to make the effort because you just donít care enough. Itís all about standards of dress and implied standards of behaviour.

The source of all this angst is a study by Jayoti Das and Stephen DeLoach of the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business at Elon University in North Carolina. They used the 2005 American Time Use Survey, which looked at what 13,000 people actually did every day. They then compared those results with participantís earnings data. The results showed that every additional minute spent in front of the mirror in the morning resulted in increased salary.

So get your comb and your hairgel out. They show commitment.

And that translates into pounds and pence.

Email frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com
Frank Mulliganís blog ñ english.talent-software.com