Fitness and employment

Dagnova

How much does your fitness level influence your employment chances?

I see getting fit (losing weight, exercising, eating healthy, etc) as an investment in my future, not only personal but also professional. I wonder how much this makes a difference in this age. What does it say about a person that he/she is super fit?

I am curious about your opinions, all of you, but especially those of you who are also employers. Thanks!

Dagnova

Bump

Chezzie84

I suppose it depends on the career you choose.
Some careers insist on good levels of fitness and some dont.

For example to join the military you need good fitness but to be an office manager, you dont.
Its about brains and ability to do the job thats important.

I would rather employ an unfit person that has the skills and attributes needed to be successful and to provide top level services than a fit person who has not got a clue what is going on and not worth the paper their wage slip is printed on.

There are laws that protect people from discrimination so employers are not going to not employ someone because they are unfit. They would lose too much if proven guilty.

brittanysmith513

I currently work in a bakery, but I will graduate with my BA in Zoology in two years so I need to become really fit in order to work in the field. And I hope to work with elephants so I need to be really fit to lift huge amounts of food for them, so it's basically a requirement that I shape up or ship out haha

Sofie1313

I agree with previous poster - I am the only "plump" person at work and my employer does not seem to care one bit.
IT is not an area where you are expected to look fit. :-)

But when I was waitressing the manager was making remarks about how I should lose weight...

motivatedmartha

I suppose it depends on the career you choose.
Some careers insist on good levels of fitness and some dont.

For example to join the military you need good fitness but to be an office manager, you dont.
Its about brains and ability to do the job thats important.

I would rather employ an unfit person that has the skills and attributes needed to be successful and to provide top level services than a fit person who has not got a clue what is going on and not worth the paper their wage slip is printed on.

There are laws that protect people from discrimination so employers are not going to not employ someone because they are unfit. They would lose too much if proven guilty.

While this is all true I have witnessed many occasions in the recruitment process where those hiring, faced with 2 people both equally qualified and able to do the job well, will select the fittest, strongest or most closely matched to our society's norms. Someone who is very overweight, seemingly breathless and with more limited mobility may well be at a disadvantage - even tho' in my experience as an employer, the fit, athletic person who engages in sports at the weekend may well also have equally high absenteeism arising from sports injuries.

Discrimination in these circumstances is very hard to prove. Sounds harsh but it's true. Getting fitter (doesn't have to be slim and beautiful - just healthy looking) has got to improve anyone's employment opportunities.

geebusuk

If I list sports on my CV, I have only listed the 'less extreme' ones.
Don't mention I tend to commute by motorcycle and so on.
But do mention "like to stay in shape by..."

Some may see it that the person who's in good shape is less likely to come down with bugs and so on - also it's a good example of determination, challenging yourself and so on.

Tillyecl1

I'm not sure it makes a massive amount of difference in terms of if the unfit candidate is better at the job they will get it (because I'm pretty sure it'd be discrimination if they didn't). However having a hobby which is based on training for events is an easy win in those interview questions where they say things like "give an example of when you have shown dedication to reach your goals". To which the answer "I trained 16+ hours per week for over 6 months in order to complete an Ironman distance triathlon for charity" is quite good. Or "I trained every other day for x amount of time to be able to run a 5km", it's an easy way to show you are dedicated, goal focused, willing to work hard etc, all that stuff that employers love to hear from candidates whilst also giving a concrete example rather than just using the phrases :-)

But still the better qualified candidate should get the job.

P.S I don't put the sports on my CV and people always get a surprise when I answer like that because I do not look like an athlete in the slightest :-)

LucasEVille

Makes no difference at all, your ability, your customer focus, your qualifications and your personality will always take precendence.
If everything is equal and I had to choose then I would look to whether I believe your a team player, possibly if an athletic person is into a very cooperative sport or such thing I might look at that favourably.... But then again I hired someone on that fact because they played MMOs and ran their own guild and raid group online. They just had that infectious personality that I knew would gel well in the team we had.

Also I had a very athletic guy who filled his CV with his sporting acomplishments and victories against opponents, he appeared on his CV and came accross at the interview as cocky, too self assured, competative and cut throat. It was for a security role involving long hours on foot and he actually made a comment about another candidate being overweight. His *kitten* was dumped at the first round.



- 8 years experience of recruiting from recruitment admin and then upto strategic recruitment supervisor.

MattyFTM

I lost a bunch of weight in summer 2011 when I was unemployed. It was a huge confidence boost, and I genuinely feel that the added self-confidence helped me secure a job in November 2011. I don't think that weighing less helped me get the job in any way (I was still massively overweight and had a long way to go - I'd just taken the first steps) but it was the fact that I felt better about myself that allowed me to shine in the job interview.

Then I went and put all of the weight back on, using the fact that I had a job now and less free time as an excuse. But that's a separate issue.

Dagnova

Cool to see so many great answers to my question!

It's late and I don't have time to reply to all of you right now, so I will just reply to some of you and I will reply to the rest later.

First, excellent points chezzie, which career you choose must determine a lot. My future career will probably (and hopefully ) require me to do quite some fieldwork (I'm in environmental science), so physical fitness is pretty useful. Now I am working as a garbage man (to pay for my studies) which good *paid* exercise .

I agree that other things like your character and professional skills are more important in most careers than physical fitness. And you're right it's not allowed to discriminate people based on something like this, but I suspect that people judge a lot based on someone looks. I suspect that if you look (and are) physically fit that people think that you are having strong willpower and character - which of course could be true but doesn't have to be true at all. The same is that people think that fat people have weak willpower (to be clear: I personally don't think that there's a strong link between your fitness/fatness and your willpower - but it's how many people think - consciously or subconsciously).

Britanny, cool study, Zoology! 2 years is a lot of time, you can get very fit in that amount of time!

Sofie, you don't look "plump" at all in the picture (if that's you). But anyways, I am happy that someone is not judged professionally on this characteristic in IT. I would love it if all people would not care whether people are plump or not!

Thanks for your interesting responds, the rest will get replies later (though I already read your replies)!