People’s facial shape and structure can influence their perceived fit for a job, reveals new research.

Published in the British Psychological Society’s Journal of Social Psychology, the study indicates that facial structure – so whether a person has a relatively long and narrow face or a relatively short and wide one – can affect the type of job they are considered suitable for.

The study used experimental methods to test how a novel appearance-based cue known as facial-width-to-height ratio (fWHR) can bias hiring preferences.

Researchers found that people believe that high fWHR candidates, (those with relatively short and wide faces), would be a better fit for blue collar jobs, such as construction, compared to low fWHR candidates (those with relatively long and narrow faces), who were in turn favoured for white collar jobs, such as law.

They also found that hypothetical hiring decisions are guided by perceptions of high fWHR as strong and low fWHR as intelligent.

The study highlights previous research which says white collar jobs require more task complexity, information processing, problem-solving, skill variety and autonomy, while blue collar jobs are traditionally more physically demanding.

Study participants preferred high and low fWHR candidates for blue and white collar jobs respectively when the jobs had traditional traits. However, when those associations were inverted, participants’ hiring recommendations were also inverted.

Lead researcher Jason Deska, an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, said the research had important implications.

“Although we know that more ‘obvious’ cues, such as attractiveness, race, and gender, affect hiring decisions, this research shows that relatively subtle cues, such as they very shape of one’s face, can also have a surprising influence in hiring decisions.”

Three separate studies were conducted as part of the research. The first involved 99 undergraduate students at a Midwestern US university who were asked to indicate their choice of face from those presented for a specified job.

The second involved 211 people from the US and UK who self-declared that they had previous recruitment experience. They were asked to imagine that they were a hiring manager at either a construction or law firm and were asked to evaluate different candidates for a number of open positions.

Study three involved 162 undergraduate students at an urban Canadian University who also took part in a hiring decision study.

Future research should consider how facial structure intersects with gender, ethnicity and other social categories to predict hiring preferences, the study says.