If this isn’t illegal, it should be.

One of the worst parts of the hiring process is that sometimes your resume qualifications and interview performance don’t matter. You could spend hours expertly tailoring your resume to a specific job posting and writing a cover letter that any hiring manager would love, all for it to go to waste once you get in the interview room. Your interview could go fantastically well by finding the perfect balance between connecting with your interviewer on a personal level and tactfully answering each question. Yet, you get rejected for something you can’t always control.

Unfortunately, some hiring managers care more about what you look like than if you can actually do a job right. This is a problem across society: attractive people are treated better, receive more opportunities, and, some might argue, have better life outcomes than so-called unattractive people. It’s pretty easy for hiring managers to discriminate on this basis, since they are unlikely to tell a job applicant, «You didn’t get this job because you aren’t attractive enough.» Unless you’re a model or an actor, you might never know what your competition for a job looks like. 

Can your employer hire or fire you based on your weight? It depends on your industry and where you live. There are no federal laws in the United States protecting against weight discrimination. There are laws protecting against weight discrimination in New York City, but that law will not help the administrative assistant in this story because she resides in Utah.