Experiencing Dress for Success through the Eyes of a Client

What affects your success in the workplace?

After volunteering for Dress for Success Lexington and talking to Analisa and Sue, I realized how important they thought appearance is in relation to whether or not the person gets the desired job. I wasn’t exactly sure if I believed in what they were preaching, so I decided to make that the main focus of my paper. When performing research in regards to what employers deem as important and essential qualities that they look for in future employer prospects, I found a lot of interesting statistics. Nonetheless, it seemed as though nearly every study reported high percentages of importance that interviewers put on the interviewees’ appearance. I strategically chose these seven to include in my infographic. I decided to include height, tone, and attractiveness because those are qualities one is born with, hair color, make-up, and clothing and grooming choice because those are intentional decisions that can be altered, and weight because it falls somewhere in the middle of those two categories. Although they are not all considered in the same category, they are all influential to the interviewer. This shows that all aspects of appearance, whether you can control them or not, play a role of how others perceive you, which initially shocked me. These statistics also show that Analisa and Sue do know what they are talking about to a certain extent, which was also extremely surprising.