One of my clients recently lost a sale. The feedback we received was that the potential customer was put off by our technician's visible tattoos and appearance.
According to the Pew Research Center, 40% of millennials have at least one tattoo. Many millennials are aware that some employers remain uneasy about body art and place their tattoos in areas that are covered by normal business dress. But I'll bet many of your applicants have not been as careful. Applicants I see for service roles and for trades and craft positions seem to have visible tattoos, piercings and unnatural hair colors at a higher rate than college grads looking for white-collar jobs.
So, how should your organization respond to this growing trend? I am reminded of a famous exchange between star basketball player Bill Walton and legendary coach John Wooden at UCLA in the early 1970's. Walton: You can't tell me how I can wear my hair, coach! Wooden: You're right Bill, but I do get to decide who plays and we're going to miss you. (here's the story)
While Coach Wooden stuck with his rigid policies, other college coaches decided to embrace the long hair trend in the 1970s. Wooden won his final championship in 1975 and the championship teams in '76, '77 and '78 had rosters full of players with longer hair than Wooden would allow. Other coaches decided hair length was no longer a deterrent to their university's brand and restrictions on hair length hurt their recruiting efforts. Sound familiar?
The first thing to review is whether your current policies accurately reflect the attitudes of your customer base. Based on the anecdotal evidence provided by a single customer, it would have been easy for my client to overreact and begin enforcing a stricter dress code for its field personnel. Fortunately, we keep metrics on technician performance and we discovered that this technician was #1 in the company in jobs closed and #2 in closing percentage over the past year. That one customer does NOT reflect the true attitudes of most of our customers, so it would have been a mistake to risk losing this technician over that one piece of feedback.
With unemployment rates dropping and the war for talent heating back up, now may be a good time to reevaluate those dress and appearance policies. Here are some things to think about:
1. Safety first - if the presence of earrings, loops, gauges, nose rings, etc. puts the employee at risk for injury or puts your product at risk for contamination, by all means ban those items from the workplace.
2. Unless you're going to stick to a "no visible tattoos allowed" policy, distinguish between offensive tattoos and tattoos in general. Gang symbols, confederate flags, sexual images and profanity pose different risks for an employer than flowers, dolphins or doves, children's names, tributes to family members and other benign images. The former can generate harassment or hostile work environment claims. Your organization must decide to what degree the latter are a business risk.
3. It is OK to have different policies for different categories of employees. No visible tattoos for outside sales people, for example, may make sense. Having no such restriction for back office, warehouse or plant floor personnel may also make sense.
It's a mistake to stereotype a candidate based on the presence of visible tattoos or green hair. Focus your interview on true predictors of success in the role - their knowledge, skills and abilities. And supplement the interview with other tools that will improve your good hire percentage (here's a previous blog on this topic). Stereotyping frequently leads to missed opportunities, no matter whether it's race, age, gender, etc. or lifestyle choices.
The main thing to remember is that if you're stuck in a rigid "no tattoo" mindset like we had in the 80s and 90s, you could be significantly shrinking the pool of potential employees (and potential star performers). Review that policy and decide if it still makes sense for your organization today. And if you're assuming your customers won't like it, find a way to survey them to ensure that your assumptions are accurate.
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