Late last week, the national officers of Delta Zeta sorority kicked out 23 of 35 members in the DePauw University chapter.

“The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.”

Hmm, sounds as if the officers need either 21st Century sensitivity training or one heck of a good spinmeister.

Wait, it gets worse.

26 year old Brant Walker started FakeYourSpace.com, where you can buy attractive friends for your social networking pages.

“He said the idea came to him when he noticed, while browsing MySpace pages, that “some people would have a lot of good-looking friends, and others didn’t.” His idea was “to turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets” by providing fictitious postings from attractive people.”

Hmm, maybe the people thus attracted should join Delta Zeta or the comparable fraternity when they hit college.

But before I could really enjoy my virtuousness for not being as petty, I remembered reading a study when I first started headhunting that attractive people received more job offers and promotions than shorter less attractive people; there was even a study showing that newborns and infants were cuddled and received more attention if they were attractive.

The attractiveness theory was unscientifically tested by MSNBC in 2004, and confirmed by Dr. Gordon Patzer, Dean, Walter E. Heller College of Business Administration (Roosevelt University) and author of The Power and Paradox of Physical Attractiveness, who’s researched the subject for 30 years, “We are just hard wired to respond more favorably to attractive people. This is something anthropologically that has existed for as long as history exists”

I’ve always said that charm is the number one reason for bad hires, what I forget is that looks are the number one reason for missing good hires.

More on this tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 10:02 am and is filed under Business info, Hiring, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: attractiveness
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