Job website: Only the beautiful need apply

Greg Hodge runs the Beautiful People dating and recruitment website. Photo / Supplied

Employers wanting to hire only "beautiful" people can now advertise to a select group on an internet network that excludes less attractive people.

The website, started by a New Zealander as a dating service, has launched a recruitment service because it says attractive people make better employees and create more success for businesses.

Since its launch this week, BeautifulPeople.com's recruitment service had been viewed by more than 50,000 of its global membership of 750,000 "beautiful" people, the company said.

Managing director Greg Hodge, now based in Los Angeles, said the 14,000 New Zealand members (more than 50,000 have been rejected) were part of an exclusive club that dozens of businesses had already signed up to potentially employ.

"We've always had numerous requests from model agencies, talent scouts and production companies all over the world ... who utilise our site looking for talent," Mr Hodge said.

"And by creating a dating site exclusively for beautiful people, we inadvertently created the largest community in the world of attractive people.

"There's a high demand for that in employers and we've seen - particularly during these tough financial times - there is a demand for attractive employees."

Mr Hodge was unapologetic about the dating site or its recruitment service, which carries the slogan, "An attractive face is always a great first impression for any business".

He said the fact that businesses wanted to employ beautiful people "might not be politically correct to say, but it's true".

Massey University psychologist Dr Stuart Carr called the recruitment site "shallow" but said that historically there was evidence people with "classical good looks" tended to have more opportunities.

"It changes their life course quite a lot," Dr Carr said. "It doesn't mean someone who's not 'beautiful' isn't going to overtake them [in the future]."

Dr Dianne Gardner, a senior lecturer at Massey University's School of Psychology, said businesses using the beautiful people website were most likely to be casting a wide net for employees.

"If the only way your organisation measures your job performance is by sitting down and admiring your beauty," she said, "well then they're a pretty bad organisation anyway."

Rating beauty

• More than 65,000 New Zealanders have applied to join BeautifulPeople.com

• More than 14,000 are members

• About 51,000 were rejected

• Gwyneth Paltrow was this year named the world's most beautiful woman by People magazine