Ever since high school, everyone tells you to always look your best for job interviews; arrive early, dress for the job you want not the job you have, and to be clean. I hopefully will never have that problem, but what would happen if I was walking to the interview and it starts to rain? The impression I am giving out would be that I am not prepared because I forgot my umbrella. But will this little thing make or break my career?
Every first impression comes with smaller impressions. We can break them down into two categories:facial expression and attire.
Jane Willis and Alexander Todorov experimented and revealed it take a tenth of a second to make an impression on a stranger based on their facial features. “Matured faces” are more likely to be taken seriously than “baby faces”. We use our past experiences to judge what the face looks like and try to determine what kind of value the person has to our social lives. But by judging our first impression by how their face is, we are looking at the emotions it holds and what kind of stereotypes it may have. We unknowingly rate faces on competence, dominance, likability and trustworthiness. Humans look at each other’s face but it can not be the only thing we base im
pressions on, it is only a part of a whole thing.
Once you get past that the person’s face looks like, you start to check them out. Their clothes can say a lot about what kind of person they are. Dr. Jennifer Baumgartner, a clinical psychologist and author of “You Are What You Wear: What Your Clothes Reveal About You” says that there is no one piece of clothing that makes someone look successful or unsuccessful, but rather how they wear the object decides for them. “The worst clothing is.. that kind that shows you didn’t pay attention to you body/age/situation..” Normally, if you go to an interview wearing a suit or neutral colored clothing, you will give off the impression that you are polished, ready to succeed and able to look presentable of that company. If someone comes in wearing anything you would wear to the club, that person may not be taken seriously.
There are, however, miscellaneous factors that go in to first impressions such as visible tattoos, piercings and if you are sexually attractive to the person or not.
With all of this in mine, can first impressions make or break a career? At job interviews, you only have about 6 minutes to convince the employer to hire you. I would say that within those 6 minutes, you would need to do everything mostly correct to be considered for the job. First impressions stick with you, whether or not you believe them anymore. If you didn’t like someone the first time you saw them, then it’ s likely you may never like them even if they seem like a decent person. First impressions are extremely important, and they shouldn’t be taken lightly.
First impressions are definitely a huge deal when interviewing for a new job or even networking. I interned for NJNG over the summer, and received a lot of first hand tips and experience on interviewing from supervisors in my department as well as interns in HR. Not only do employers care about how you present yourself, but also how you act and react to certain questions. One day there was an applicant who showed up an hour later for her interview, and that was the first thing she addressed. She did so calmly and confidently, glad to answer their inquiry. The employers loved that! Another factor in first impressions is your handshake. From experience, I know it can be kind of challenging to master a decent- if not perfect handshake. That would be an interesting topic to look in to; is the studies behind a first handshake and correlating opinions/impressions that come with it, or even just the science behind what exactly is a perfect handshake!
I concur; first impressions are very important. I’m a freshman in the Smeal College of Business and I’ve already had to wear business professional attire twice. What I wear and my countenance when first meeting recruiters, I observed, directly correlates with the amount of respect and the amount of attention I get. A Forbes article stated how “research shows it takes an average of three hours of continuous interaction to develop the same level of rapport that you can get with a single handshake.” Like it or not, first impressions are an important reality in this world, especially in business.
Oops! Sorry about that one link. The correct one is here . 🙂
Hey Anastasia!
I completely agree with your blog. I’m someone who is all about first impressions and no matter where I’m going I always try to look my best because I really believe it’s important.
There was a recent <a href="http://www.livescience.com/43439-first-impressions-hard-to-change.html"<study done at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Austin, Texas which proved that people do actually tend to “judge a book buy it’s cover” even though we don’t like to admit it. Studies were also done by a psychologist at Cornell University named Vivian Zayas which proved the same theory using photographs.
The idea of first impressions is something really important that could benefit a lot of people if they actually took advantage of it!