Research On The Influence Of The Shape And Shape On The Recruitment Decision

Body build stereotype is some inherent concepts hold for a group with a certain body size. Due to a larger proportion of obesity, researchers in western countries as early as in twentieth century sixty years, began to focus on the impressions and attitudes of obesity groups concerned about people. After lots of investigations on body build stereotype and fat prejudice, it is found that there is a ingrained negative stereotype and pervasive prejudice towards fat people. They can be found in from children to adults. They exist in from the medical service to the school education, even in hiring process which is aimed to be fair. In china, there is a old saying that:"Don’t judge a man by his appearance" and a dynasty that put The "fat is beautiful" as the mainstream aesthetic standards. However, in recent years, China’s growing obesity, the public aesthetic into the esteem to the thin and skinny. So in the history and culture of our country specic context, what stereotype about different body size is held by our people? In the recruitment process, is the recruitment of personnel also exists the body build bias?Compared with foreign countries’ rich studies in body build stereotype and bias, studies in this aspect at home is extremely lack. In order to make our resarch can be better used in practice, this paper focused on the work field. We explored work relevant body build implicit stereotype, furthermore, we investigated the hiring process to find weather recruiters would be effected by candidates’size or not. The subjects of this research are university students. The whole study is composed of three Implicit Association Tests and a recruiting process simulation experiment.Experiment1is composed of three Implicit Association Tests. The creative work is using work related features of words as attributes and subdividing body build into three categories which is fat, Medium body and thin. We enriched the studies on people’s stereotype about thin people, at the same time we explore the work related implicit stereotype on different body build held by people.The body build bias in the process of hiring was examined in experiment2. We conducted an simulation experiment. Compared with previous researchers always simulating resume screening process by presenting resumes, we tried to simulate an interview process by presenting videos of virtual candidates of different body build(fat, medium body and thin). This experiment will fill the domestic blank on the empirical research of body build bias in the recruitment process.The research got the following findings:1. In the background of Chinese culture, implicit body build stereotype does really exist deep in people’s mind. Three Implicit Association Tests shows that, when people in the evaluation of job related characteristics, they tend to associate positive personality characteristics relevant to the work to medium body people while attach negative personality characteristics to fat or thin people. Interestingly, when fat people were compared with thin people, it shows no obvious stereotypes toward onside. People do not think that fat and thin people have obvious positive and negative points.2. The simulation experiment shows that in the recruiting process of sales position which is has a high degree of public contact, the hiring probability of medium body build women candidate is higher than fat and thin women candidate, but the difference is not significant. The hiring probability of different body build man candidate is almost equal.In conclusion, this research explored work relevant body build implicit stereotype in the culture of our country. It showed that compared with fat people or thin people, people automatically associate outstanding occupation quality to medium body build people. And on the basis of results of implicit stereotype study, investigated the body build bias in interview process in recruitment. The data of this simulation experiment did not successfully support previous hypothesis. For this, we discussed the probable causes for this result in detail and on the basis of the foreign research status, the result of our Implicit Association Test experiments and the trend that employers prefer medium body build women candidate, we put forward some suggestions that feasible and with practical meaning for solving fat bias and improving the fairness in enterprise recruitment.