Some of Ukraine’s famously beautiful women cannot resist trying to score a job with their looks.
Besides education and work experience, their resumes regularly include titillating photos that can easily disqualify them as being unprofessional.
International law firm Baker & McKenzie’s Kyiv office is no stranger to the phenomenon. Yulia Matsyk, the company’s human resources manager, claimed resumes with such photos are particularly common in the case of entry-level positions.
“I receive these kinds of [revealing] resumes in applications for administrative positions, including secretaries and junior lawyers,” Matsyk said, adding that this implies such misunderstandings happen due to the inexperience of young job seekers.
“A person with no experience of working at an international law firm might not feel that it’s inappropriate,” she noted. “We subscribe to completely different standards.”
On the bright side, expert recruiters say the provocative tradition is slowly dying.
Yulia Makarova, a senior consultant at Hudson, a global consulting firm providing recruitment services in Ukraine, said the growing presence of multinational firms in Ukraine means Western standards have spilled over to the local job market and the business mentality. This includes equality for all job applicants, Makarova explained, which means decisions based on appearance, age and gender are avoided as a potential basis for discrimination lawsuit.
“It’s rather a norm in Western business mentality,” she said.
Yet the issue of sexy resumes remains a problem at some, primarily Ukrainian job settings, where women are not valued on their professional skills alone. “To a certain extent it is dictated by companies usually of a lower level [and that are] not well-known,” noted Makarova.
Under Hudson international recruitment standards, photos are typically not included in a job application. According to the company, which serves mostly large global corporations, only two to five percent of their clients request photos with a potential employee’s resume. “And in this case we’re talking about a professional looking, full-face photo,” added the Hudson consultant.
Valeriya Tsymbalenko was one of many women to stray outside those guidelines when she applied for a sales manager position at the Kyiv Post in June.
“At that moment I didn’t have a fresh passport-style photo. I only had (the one showing me in) full length and business attire,” she said. “For me it doesn’t matter. Just because a person has a presentable appearance, it doesn’t mean that, to put it roughly, she would lay under somebody.”
Nonetheless, she admitted having thought about the feelings she could stir up in her potential boss, especially since many of her friends were “offered secretary jobs which included a few more responsibilities of the intimate type.”
Tsymbalenko quickly adds: “But I would never consider such offers.”
Yet some businesses place attractive female looks among their list of expectations. High-end stores, such as fashion boutiques and luxury car salons often look for people that would be the face of their company.
“This could be the case for a top manager assistant’s position. Indeed many want to be accompanied by a pretty lady,” explained Yulia Pasechnaya, head of recruitment company Brain Source International in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, recruitment experts agree that the winning strategy for landing a job is to concentrate on a resume’s original purpose – to inform about a candidate’s qualifications. They recommend not sending photos altogether.
“A resume can tell a lot about the person, even without a photo. (Employers look at) how well it is structured, whether it is professionally arranged or not, whether or not there is a cover letter,” Baker & McKenzie’s Matsyk said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Maryna Irkliyenko can be reached at [email protected].
