According to a recent research held at Rice University and the University of Houston, acne and facial blemishes may distract interviewers and therefore they will not be able to remember clearly the progress of the interview. This means that people who come in for interviews with facial problems will face a hard time in getting interviewers to remember their performance. It gets difficult to recall information about job candidates if they have a case of severe acne or other facial problems.

According to Mikki Hebl, a psychology professor at Rice University, “When evaluating applicants in an interview setting, it’s important to remember what they are saying. Our research shows if you recall less information about competent candidates because you are distracted by characteristics on their face, it decreases your overall evaluations of them.”
The research was based on a couple of experiments where 170 undergraduate students were asked to conduct mock interviews. Their eyes were tracked to identify level of distraction. It was seen that the interviewer’s attention was distracted by facial blemishes and the less they remembered about the job candidate, the lower they rated them.
In other experiment, 38 full time managers conducted face to face interviews with job candidates who had some form of facial birthmarks. These professional managers were also found to be highly distracted by birthmarks.

According to Hebl, “The bottom line is that how your face looks can significantly influence the success of an interview,”. He also stated, “There have been many studies showing that specific groups of people are discriminated against in the workplace, but this study takes it a step further, showing why it happens. The allocation of attention away from memory for the interview content explains this.”

Details of these findings were published on-line in the Journal of Applied Psychology. With this research, investigators hoped workplace discrimination could be brought into the limelight and dealt with.