Career Appearance: Perceptions of University Students and Recruiters Who Visit Their Campuses

Abstract

As more people engage in long‐term careers requiring professional degrees and as positions become more difficult to obtain, appearance of employees will probably become increasingly important as a factor in hiring, retaining, and promoting employees. This study was designed to determine if students (S) and the recruiters (R) who visited their campuses had similar perceptions of the role of appearance in the pursuit of a career, and if their perceptions differed according to selected personal and employment characteristics. Likert‐type opinion naires were completed by 767 respondents (S = 498; R = 269). Seven scores, representing various aspects of the importance of attire on employee evaluations, were subjected to either Wilcoxon or Kruskal‐Wallis analyses. Some significant differences occurred when the sources of variation were employment status, occupational orientation (current, R; projected, S), sex, and age of respondents; occupations of main wage earners in their families; and respon dents' projected amount of direct contact with clients. Overall, however, S and R perceptions of career appearance were similar.