Employment or Happy Hour

Looking for a new job? You might want to lay off the bottle.

A series of six experiments conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania, found that being associated with alcohol makes you less hirable. In one of their experiments, researchers asked 610 middle managers at various U.S. companies to evaluate a video of a dinner interview.

In all cases the questions and answers were the same. But when it came to choice of beverage both the potential employer and interviewee switched between ordering a coke or the house merlot. The study showed that regardless of what the manager ordered, any job seeker that went for wine was seen as less intelligent and less worthy of being hired. They scored extremely low if they had ordered the wine after the manager had ordered soda.

Rick Smith is a Professor of Marketing at Michigan and one of the head researchers. Smith says merely holding an alcoholic beverage may reduce the intelligence of a person in the eyes of an employer. So it’s time to make a decision, employment or happy hour? I guess it depends on the type of meeting you prefer.