High School Athletes Score
Call it revenge for all those “dumb jock” jokes.
“People expect former high school athletes to be significantly more self-confident and demonstrate more leadership and more self-respect than people who participated in other popular non-sport extracurricular activities,” says Kevin Kniffin, post-doctoral research associate at Cornell University, and co-author of a study in the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies.
Probing both a sample of 66 working adults at least 25 years old, as well as a sample of 100 college undergraduates, researchers found that regardless of the gender or the personal sports history of the respondents, they tended to hold favorable opinions of high school athletic achievement in evaluating hypothetical candidates.
“There is peer-reviewed research and evidence that undergraduate students are legitimate proxies for hiring managers,” says Kniffin.
Therefore, when interviewing for a job, it’s beneficial to bring up high school accomplishments if asked about sports participation, Kniffin notes.
After the article, “People have contacted me to share anecdotes of interviewing for jobs unrelated to sports – like a media relations rep or social worker. They are confident that they got the job because it stuck out during the interviews when they mentioned something about their various points of success in high school sports.”
The anecdotal evidence also suggests that it doesn’t matter if the high school sport triumph was years ago. All of the feedback he’s received, notes Kniffin, comes from women forty years old or more. Future research, he adds, could focus on the impacts of types of sports achievements.
It’s probably not worthwhile to list a high school sport on a resume, however. “It’s likely that formal selection processes for most firms would consider high school sports experience [on a resume] to be ‘noise,’” Kniffin says. Describing achievements when appropriate in interviews, he concludes, is probably the way to score points with employers.