Piercing the Interview
Dear Mr. Librarianish Guy,
So I'm currently going to school to get my MLIS and recently I've been thinking of getting an eyebrow piercing. I have no other piercings but before I commit to piercing(s) like that I want to know if it would hurt my chances of getting a job in the future.
The quick answer is No, for the most part, because libraries are pretty progressive places. There are plenty of ladies with tattoos, piercings, all that sort of stuff. I mean, c’mon, they pay us crap, the hours stink, they can’t really afford to dismiss people with a Dewey decimal tattoo for their favorite section in the sciences, knowwhatimean?
Besides, I think on the hierarchy of piercings that are going to be an issue, anything on the ears is probably no biggie, and eyebrows, noses, and small studs just about anywhere really don’t make the average person shudder these days. My generation has tattooed themselves so hard that tattoos have lost all meaning, and very few people view tattoos and piercings as having negative meaning about a person’s character anymore.
But this is a No with a caveat:
Someone I consider a friend moved to Texas not too long ago and works in libraries, and library work is a bit of a different world there than it is in Colorado. Ladies are expected to be more dressed up, and full makeup is the norm. In Colorado, we’re pretty casual, and being in nice jeans, no makeup, and a non-branded shirt will have you dressed a good couple steps above 99% of the patrons you see in the library.
I don’t think “Women must wear makeup” is in the Texas library system’s employee handbook or anything, but when you’re angling for a job, I give you better odds of landing the position if you conform to (and probably go a bit above) the unstated appearance norms of the place when you interview.
Depending where in the world we’re talking, an eyebrow piercing might not be helpful in getting a job.
We’re not totally done here, though, because I have Okay Boomer advice on this:
I think there's a lot of talk about being authentic in the workplace and so on, and I get that.
I’m not that guy because I don’t feel like my authentic self is workplace-friendly. Sad as it is to say, I don’t think I can be my authentic self in any workplace. I mean, I write a whole homoerotic redux of the Batman & Robin novelization. That’s something very fun for me, I consider writing stuff like that a part of who I am as a person, and I never share that in the workplace because I just can’t expect other people to love it.
I was ESPECIALLY not a big authenticity guy when I was trying to get a full-time job in 2008, during the financial crisis. Being my authentic self was not something that I felt I could afford, literally.
To put this in a specific context: I remember being in my apartment, I was totally broke, and I was a full day away from payday, so I ate peanut butter on graham crackers because that was the only food I had. For a full day, that was what I ate. I would rate it as a pretty okay breakfast, shitty lunch, and when you’re taking your third knife out of the drawer for the day, you think about just stabbing yourself in the eye instead of using it to spread peanut butter.
For me, in my circumstances, piercings, tattoos, and dressing a certain way—looking into those empty kitchen cabinets, I didn’t feel like I could risk the prospect of full-time work because I wanted to express myself through my appearance. Because the job market was ROUGH at that time, I didn’t feel like I could be selective, I felt like I had to struggle to get something, anything, that would pay the bills.
Now, this way of thinking goes against a lot of folks who will tell you that you should be your authentic self because part of the interview process is seeing whether YOU want to work THERE, and there is some truth to the idea that if you land a job being inauthentic, you may not be super happy at that job, they may not be super happy with you, and nobody is super pleased. And then it’s 20 years later, life has passed you by, and you start wondering if maybe you SHOULD have gone ahead and gouged out your own eye, at least then you’d be Eyepatch Guy. There’s a mystique there, right?
I think presenting yourself authentically and being true to yourself in the interview process is good advice for someone who is either a little bit established in their field and/or has resources/savings/support systems that would allow them to pass up the first job that comes along.
I might consider making the decision based on this: Are you at a place in life where you want to get a job, any job, and if you don’t, you won’t make rent next month, or are you at a place in life where not getting a job for a few months is okay?
For me, it came down to the fact that authenticity wasn’t affordable. Horrible? Yes. Sucks? Yes. Capitalism keeping me down? Sure. But that was my reality.
I do want to say something else in defense of people who might be a little judgmental when it comes to piercings and tattoos and so on.
When you come in for an interview, people don’t really know much about you, and they will make judgments based on how you present yourself. This can be bad in terms of judging things like wearing your hair in a natural way or wearing bright colors, that’s a dick move.
But when we talk about choices, the way you present yourself does indicate a bit about your expectations and understanding of your particular work environment.
If you are wearing flip-flops, it’s not necessarily that the interview panel hates flip-flops, it’s not that none of them have flip-flops in their closet, it’s that they will interpret your footwear choice as signaling that you didn’t care about this job enough to find a pair of shoes that you’d wear to, I don’t know, a funeral. Just consider the interview a funeral for your youth and joie de vivre.
If you come in with a ton of tattoos on your forearms, your interview panel may wonder why you didn’t just wear something with long sleeves, hedge your bets, you know?
They will interpret your choices (not your natural features) as indicative of your desire to get the job or not. Maybe this is fair, maybe not, but it’s true.
And the other thing is, we all have our limits.
I wouldn’t hire a librarian with a highly visible tattoo of a nude woman spreading her vagina open on their forearm (I sat next to this person on an airplane once. As tattoos go, it was…a choice. I don’t think he was a librarian, but you never know). I would probably have to think about it if the tattoo was relatively tasteful, a classic flash tattoo, with a topless woman. It’s a far cry from the anatomy lesson I got from the one tattoo, but it’s still something that might cause friction in the workplace.
Or maybe consider a tattoo that’s gun-related. I think a lot of hiring teams wouldn’t be thrilled about hiring someone who has their love of firearms tattooed all over.
Again, it’s not something that I’m personally offended by, but, as a supervisor, I could see patrons and coworkers complaining, and I would have to deal with that, and inviting that into my day-to-day when I’m just trying to get by seems like a bad decision on my part. If I’ve got another fairly-equivalent candidate who could take the job and NOT have me emailing people who were upset by their children seeing labia on a dude’s forearm, I’ll probably go for that option.
I don’t bring that up because an eyebrow piercing is the same thing as a naked lady tattoo or an AR-15 tattoo, I bring it up because everyone has their limit. It’s not fair that some people have a threshold that’s too low, from my perspective, but on the other hand, someone may walk into an interview and challenge my threshold someday.
And, I bring it up to point out that it might not be a matter of personal taste on the part of the hiring team, it might be a matter of what they think the public will tolerate.
Look, ultimately, I think it comes down to the specific place you’re working, the environment, the part of the world, and the culture of the workplace. Some workplaces have shitty cultures that I don’t really like or understand. Personally, I think a librarian with an eyebrow piercing or tattoos is probably more relatable than one who outfits themselves like a stereotypical 1950s librarian (the real-life, non-horny, non-pulp-novel variety). If you’re working at a university, and you’re wearing a suit and tie in the library every day, I feel like you’ve removed yourself so far from the students as to be unapproachable.
But that’s me.
Which brings us to my conclusion: I would hire someone with an eyebrow piercing. Honestly, I might not even notice or recollect that the person had an eyebrow piercing the next day. It would not be a factor for me, personally.
And even though I would hire someone with an eyebrow piercing, I would not pierce my eyebrow if I was about to be on the hunt for a job. Just because if I’m weighing helpful versus unhelpful, that doesn’t fall on the helpful side.
You do you. It’s okay to be mad about not getting hired because you have a piercing. That’s stupid. And at the same time, being mad about it doesn’t put anything other than peanut butter in that cabinet.