Blind hiring policy (South Korea)

Blind hiring policy (South Korea) is presented as an attempt to curb the institutional influence of appearance in employment. Until 2019, job advertisements in South Korea required applicants in every sector to submit a photograph with a résumé, even when appearance had no obvious relevance to the work. A national assembly bill introduced blind hiring, but the book stresses that the reform did not dislodge the wider beauty standards that continue to shape how people are judged.

Definition and Context

The policy belongs to a broader conflict between formal fairness and deeply rooted appearance norms. South Korea is described as a society in which people comment openly on one another’s looks, while pressure to conform extends across professions. The expectation of a small V-shaped face, defined jaw and pointed chin, large eyes, an upturned nose, smooth pale skin, and carefully controlled body proportions illustrates the scale of the standard against which individuals may be measured. In this setting, removing a photograph from a résumé addresses one visible mechanism of discrimination without eliminating the cultural assumptions that make appearance seem relevant in the first place.

Beauty as Professional Capital

The book places the policy beside the enormous labor invested in maintaining an acceptable appearance. South Korea was the world’s third-largest online beauty-products market in 2023, according to Euromonitor, and cosmetic treatment is described as accessible, relatively inexpensive, and socially normalized. Idols attend weekly laser treatments and skin cleanings; more broadly, surgery and other interventions can be discussed casually within families and workplaces. The account of relatives encouraging eyelid surgery, and of a trainee being sent back to surgery when a company decided that she had looked better before, shows how beauty can operate as a professional qualification even when formal recruitment rules attempt to make it irrelevant.

The same pressure appears in the entertainment industry’s management of bodies. K-pop stars are expected to remain extremely thin, train for weeks and months with personal trainers or Pilates instructors, and follow restrictive diets centered on grilled skinless chicken breast and boiled eggs. IU described losing almost five kilograms in five days through an apple, two potatoes or bananas, and a protein shake, later connecting public body-shaming with eating disorders and body dysmorphia. T.O.P of BigBang was initially rejected by Yang Hyun-suk as too heavy and returned after losing twenty kilograms in forty days. These examples clarify the limits of blind hiring: a rule can remove a photograph at the point of application, but it cannot by itself undo a social order that rewards disciplined conformity of the body.

Limits and Contradictions

The policy’s significance is therefore both practical and symbolic. It acknowledges that employers may treat a face as evidence of competence, suitability, or social value, yet the surrounding culture continues to make appearance a subject of ordinary conversation and economic investment. Even extreme professional grooming is not necessarily enough. The book describes a photo shoot in which a naturally beautiful K-pop star, after two hours of hair, makeup, and manicure, was digitally reshaped in real time with the Liquify tool: the photographer flattened the shoulder line and narrowed the waist, pushing an already perfected body toward a supernatural ideal.

This contradiction also informs the representation of Jungkook. His carefully maintained appearance satisfies Korean beauty expectations while challenging older Western stereotypes that treated Asian men as emasculated or sexually undesirable. His styling, makeup, body, and gender-flexible approach to clothing made him part of a new international image of Asian masculinity. Yet that visibility is inseparable from the beauty system’s demanding labor and surveillance. The policy seeks to prevent appearance from deciding who receives work; the idol industry demonstrates how thoroughly appearance can still determine recognition, desirability, and opportunity after formal rules have changed.

Institutional and Social Significance

The book does not portray blind hiring as a complete solution, nor does it provide evidence that the policy transformed recruitment across South Korea. Instead, it uses the reform to expose a wider institutional problem: when beauty is treated as ordinary social information, discrimination can survive even after one administrative practice is prohibited. The policy marks a public effort to separate employment from visual judgment, while the continuing force of cosmetic treatment, body discipline, and celebrity styling reveals how difficult that separation remains.

Its importance lies in making visible the difference between equality in procedure and equality in lived conditions. A résumé without a photograph may conceal an applicant’s face from an initial decision, but it cannot erase the beauty standards that shape confidence, social treatment, workplace expectations, and later evaluation. In the book’s account, blind hiring is thus a meaningful but incomplete intervention in a society where the body remains a site of economic and cultural governance.