This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: To make a good impression at work, it might be better to spend less time polishing your resume and more time honing your communication skills. That's according to a large analysis of more than 200 studies showing that the first impressions people make at work are largely based on verbal and nonverbal communication styles, with substantive content—like the experience shown on a resume—accounting for a smaller share of these key impressions.
What's more, those first impressions, which are often formed in less than a minute, can have a lasting influence on key decisions like mentorship opportunities and promotions weeks and even months later. The three strongest factors driving first impressions across the studies were communication style, physical appearance and what are known as content cues, or the substance of what's written and said. "The single most shocking finding of this study is that content cues were the weakest predictors of first impressions," said Brian Swider, a professor of business at the University of Florida and co-author of the new study.
"So what somebody has said about you, what your resume says, the content of what you say in initial interactions is not as impactful as the other two cues." Swider and his collaborators at UF's Warrington College of Business, along with T. Brad Harris of HEC Paris, published their findings in the journal Personnel Psychology. The researchers combined 204 independent samples from 145 studies of first impressions in workplace settings.
This meta-analysis allowed them to look across different jobs, countries, education levels and study designs to identify patterns that held up across a wide range of circumstances, rather than relying on findings from any one workplace or experiment. The analysis found that people tend to form an overall positive or negative impression of someone rather than independently judging individual traits like competence, warmth or trustworthiness. That broad initial judgment can then influence how they interpret later information about the person.
"People want to think that they are making really high-level analytical decisions based on effectively evaluating evidence," Swider said. "And all research on first impressions says that no matter what we try to do, that's not what's happening." Those judgments also proved durable. Although the influence of first impressions weakened over time, the analysis found they remained associated with how people viewed one another weeks later.
"The impression you form of somebody in the first handful of minutes of meeting them will strongly relate to how you feel about them more than a month later," Swider said. That persistence can matter in the workplace because first impressions were tied to both achievement-related outcomes, such as hiring and performance evaluations, and relationship outcomes, including whether people wanted to work with someone or seek their advice. The findings also point to a challenge for employers trying to keep subjective impressions from influencing consequential decisions.
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