An Ugly Truth, or a Beautiful Lie?

There are times when I’m out wandering around the Web, looking for business news to mock, ridicule or praise, when I come upon a story that makes me wonder if someone is having a joke at my expense – if I am being trolled, to use the current expression. Some of these are fairly obvious (like the genius that was PenguinWarehouse.com), and some are actually disappointing, like the site that claimed to be offering “pirate hunting” cruises off the Horn of Africa (complete with your choice of gun and ammo!). But some just aren’t clear, like the one about the dating web site catering exclusively to visually attractive subscribers…

I’m not going to link to it; even if it’s not actually a scam or a practical joke, I don’t really think they should be encouraged. But you’ve probably seen the story, or heard about it some other news source. Unlike most dating sites, which will generally accept anyone who swears they aren’t a sex offender and lets their membership work out who is attractive enough for whom on their own, beautifulpeople.com claims to screen applicants for aesthetic quality before allowing them to join, and promises to de-list anyone who is found wanting by a significant percentage of their members. How they do this profitably isn’t clear; nor is how they keep people from sending them doctored photographs or re-applying with one if they have been previously voted off…

The story which broke this week and eventually percolated up into the MSN Nowwebsite indicates that this stunt (or joke, if it is one) has now been taken to the next level: the site is now offering a recruitment service as well. Prospective employers who specifically want to hire the most attractive people available to fill an open position can use this service to select applicants for interview based on their appearance. Again, it isn’t clear from the news stories what recourse you would have if the applicants you called in for interview were not as attractive (or skilled) as advertised – or, for that matter, what recourse the applicants would have if someone asks them to come to an interview solely for the purpose of propositioning them…

Whether any of this would actually be legal isn’t clear either. Visually unappealing people are not a protected class under Federal law, and the company behind this site isn’t imposing any standards about what is or is not attractive in the first place. If your interviewees included people from all ethnicities, ages, backgrounds and so on (all of whom happen to be visually attractive) it would be difficult to claim discrimination on any of those bases; it would be even harder to prove if you actually hired a diverse cross-section of demographics. And even if discrimination on the basis of attractiveness was actionable, there really are jobs for which visual appearance is a factor...

A more immediate question would be whether you can get the best employees for any particular position if you are limiting the applicant pool to this extent. The popular image of attractive people being less capable because they get by on their looks is a myth; I’ve met some exceptionally talented good-looking people, and some completely incompetent ugly ones. But if you are only interviewing the top 10% of all applicants based on their appearance, you probably aren’t interviewing the top 10% of all applicants in terms of ability. Unless looking good is their single most important duty there is a non-zero chance that you are deliberately impairing your company’s performance by doing this…

Of course, this whole concept is also questionable from a moral and ethical standpoint, both for the hiring manager who uses this service and for the applicant who posts a resume (and, one assumes, a picture) to this database. But that’s a discussion for another day…