Day: November 27, 2025

• Research shows women with curly hair may face bias in professional settings.
• Former journalist Priya Anand has a new podcast about curly hair, including its perception in the workplace.
• Do you think having curly hair has affected your career? Business Insider wants to know.

Having curly hair in the workplace can be fraught. Just ask Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The Florida Congresswoman’s wavy locks were the subject of a recent Business Insider article about how pressure to straighten them has followed her throughout her career. It was based on her appearance on “We Are Spiraling,” a new podcast about curly hair by former journalist Priya Anand, who has ringlets, too.

Anand launched the show earlier this month along with a Substack to complement her forthcoming hair care product line, Mayura. She told Business Insider she could relate to her high-profile political guest.

“In high school, other girls would tell me I’d look so much better if I straightened my hair,” Anand said in an email, adding that over time she learned not to let critics bother her. “At some point, I started tuning out noise around how I should reshape my appearance based on other people’s commentary.”

Research shows women with curly hair — especially those who are Black — can face bias in professional settings, which is why Anand says many intentionally hide their curls. Lawmakers have sought to address the problem through legislation, such as the 2019 CROWN Act, which bans race-based hair discrimination.

If you’re a curly-haired professional, Business Insider would love to hear from you. How has it affected your career? Tell us your story below.

• Struggling job seekers are taking part-time gigs outside their fields to make ends meet.
• Some say they’re unsure whether to include these roles in applications for full-time jobs.
• They say it’s uncertain whether employers will view their temporary gigs in a positive light.

Kevin Hannegan is proud of the string of part-time gigs he has taken on while looking for full-time work. He’s just not sure they belong on his résumé.

Since being laid off from his director role at a publishing company in January 2024, Hannegan has driven for DoorDash, worked on the changeover crew at the Lenovo Center in Raleigh — helping convert the arena between concerts and sporting events — and taken on odd jobs for friends, including fixing deck boards and replacing ceiling fans.

He said he asked several people in his life whether it’s wise to include gigs like these on his résumé when applying for full-time roles in his field, and the feedback was roughly split. Half said he should, since it showed he was still working; the other half said listing roles that weren’t full-time or relevant to his field probably wouldn’t be helpful.

Regardless of what he includes, he knows employers will likely have questions about the past two years.

“Being unemployed from full-time work for this long will definitely require some explanation during an interview — whether the information is on a résumé or not,” said Hannegan, who’s in his 50s.

Hannegan is one of several job seekers Business Insider has spoken with over the past year who have taken part-time jobs outside their field to earn income while continuing to search for work. Many said they’ve grappled with whether to include temporary roles on their applications — fearing that a résumé gap could hurt their chances, but that listing a job significantly different from their desired role might do the same.

In a challenging job market, some candidates say even small résumé choices are worth agonizing over.

Whether to hide work experience on your résumé

A San Francisco-based millennial has worked contract positions at Microsoft and Amazon in recent years, earning about $120,000 annually. When the latter ended in December 2023, he struggled to find another role.

At first, he wasn’t interested in the job postings recruiters sent him that offered as little as $75,000 a year. But after a year of struggling to find work — and relying on unemployment benefits and food stamps to stay afloat — his perspective shifted.

“By the end of 2024, I would have loved to make $75,000,” he said.

After a year of unemployment, he began applying for any gig he could find, and eventually secured work as a ghost tour guide for $30 an hour and a US Postal Service mail carrier for $24 hourly. He estimated that he’ll earn about $55,000 this year across the two jobs.

While he hasn’t stopped applying for communications roles, you won’t find either of his current gigs on his résumé. He believes many companies are biased against candidates who are unemployed or working outside their field.

It’s unclear how much job seekers stand to gain by leaving certain gigs off their applications. Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor at Indeed, said it’s generally wise to include any work experience — even if it’s temporary or outside one’s field — and to highlight the skills gained from those roles.

“It’s not a surprise to employers right now that a lot of people are struggling in the job market,” she said, “And I think it shows initiative that you’ve continued to stay in the workforce in some capacity.”

Hannegan said he considered adding his changeover crew job to his résumé because it’s a unique role that might catch an employer’s attention — and signals that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to support his family.

However, Hannegan isn’t optimistic that tweaking his résumé would make a difference. He said he recently decided to pause his search for a full-time role and focus on part-time gigs.

“It’s exhausting to put in the work and get no response,” he said.

Finding ways to avoid a résumé gap

Some job seekers aren’t just being selective about which gigs they include in applications — they’re also trying to avoid a résumé gap. The key, some say, is finding any relevant experience they can frame as their current role.

In addition to leaving his mailman and ghost tour gigs off his résumé, the San Francisco-based millennial lists his current employment as an independent communications consulting business. He said the business is barely active and brings in little income, but he includes it to avoid showing an employment gap — and to maintain the appearance that he’s still working in his field.

“I have to keep this charade up that my independent communications business is healthy and successful and that I’m not hustling as a letter carrier,” he said.

Miles Bradley has been searching for work since losing his contract software engineering role at AT&T in 2022. He said he’s the chief technology officer of a startup, but the company is still securing funding and isn’t yet providing any income. Still, he keeps it on his résumé to signal that he remains active in the tech industry.

“The industry has become addicted to finding the ‘Goldilocks’ candidates,” said Bradley, who’s in his 50s and lives in New York. “They want to have somebody that exactly fits what they’re looking for.”

Lisa Rangel, CEO of Chameleon Resumes, an executive job search firm, said job seekers have good reason to keep a current position on their résumés — and especially on their LinkedIn profiles. Some recruiters, she said, are more likely to search for candidates who are currently employed — in part because they’re perceived as a “safer” hire than someone who isn’t working.

To improve their chances of being discovered, Rangel recommends job seekers add a current position to their LinkedIn profile if they’re not formally employed. This could be a personal consulting or freelance role — if they’ve done relevant work — or a placeholder title such as “Seeking marketing manager role,” with the “company” field reflecting their target industry.

“You need a ‘current position’ that outlines what you are doing during your unemployment period,” Rangel said.

At a minimum, Indeed’s Rathod recommends that job seekers address résumé gaps in their résumé and cover letters, as well as during interviews.

Juan Pelaez said he’s been fortunate not to have an employment gap on his résumé, despite being laid off in 2023. That’s because he’s continued doing part-time work for his former employer while searching for full-time marketing and project management roles.

Pelaez, who’s in his 40s, also has a side gig that he has debated including in his applications. To earn some income during his job search, he’s worked as a background actor on a few films — including “Happy Gilmore 2.” He hasn’t listed the acting work on his résumé, but said he’s now reconsidering.

“Not having it on there hasn’t yielded positive results, so maybe putting it in there would help,” he said.

• Being well-liked is an asset at work. When cutbacks become routine, it can make a difference.
• That’s especially true in industries like tech, where layoffs and AI-driven change have made likability extra valuable.
• Likability matters most in roles requiring collaboration, but technical skills remain essential.

Survival for some tech workers could come down to something more than code quality or shipping speed: likability.

There is an increased focus in the industry on pleasing the boss as well as “upper upper management,” said Soubhik Dawn, who has worked in tech for nearly two decades.

Of course, being well-liked is important if you want to get ahead in any career, but it’s become an especially relevant topic in tech as layoffs and AI transform the industry.

“There is a little bit of showmanship that is going on. That’s what I’m hearing from my circle,” said Dawn, founder of Upplai, which uses AI to help job seekers with résumés and cover letters.

Competence still matters, yet at a time when some tech companies are demanding more of workers, being well-liked can be the thing that keeps you in your job.

‘The most important skill’

Being likable is a “more important skill than computer programming, or system design, or algorithms,” said another tech worker who spoke to Business Insider on the condition of anonymity because his employer doesn’t permit staffers to speak to the press.

Getting along well, especially with the higher-ups, has become “the most important skill to survive,” he said.

It’s a lesson that’s taken him a little while to learn, he said. He once tried to take on too many tasks to try to please his boss and skip-level managers. That led to him falling behind. Instead, he said that he should have spent more time cultivating relationships with those in management.

Dawn, from Upplai, said he had seen likability at work take several forms. Over the years, he’s watched as some colleagues seemed to prioritize hanging out with VPs or senior VPs and offered to add a bit of polish to a slide deck or run errands.

Those workers, Dawn said, could then go on to complete some small project and “get recognition like crazy.”

In some cases, becoming likable in the eyes of the boss comes from simply getting a lot done or doing what you say you’ll do — and flagging any issues before they balloon into bigger problems.

“That kind of leads to likability,” Dawn said. “Likability is more like dependability.”

Warmth before competence

In the workplace and elsewhere, we often judge people first on warmth — which includes traits like trustworthiness — and only afterward on competence or skill, said Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist and former professor at Harvard Business School.

In moments of uncertainty, warmth dominates, she told Business Insider. Cuddy has researched perceptions of warmth versus competence in the workplace for more than two decades.

“What people are calling likability right now is actually a proxy for trustworthiness, and trust is historically low,” she said.

Cuddy said that when people feel uncertain, they start to read each other differently. When trust is low, people tend to rely heavily on trust cues as the most effective way to assess someone, she said.

So, while being capable is still important, if your colleagues don’t like you, it can hold you back. Your competence can even become a threat if you’re not trustworthy, Cuddy said.

She said that the desire for trust is why “likability suddenly sounds more important than the technical skill.”

It’s less about whether your colleague wants to have a beer with you after work, Cuddy said. “It’s about feeling safe,” she said.

“Trust is the conduit of influence,” Cuddy said. “You could have a million great ideas, but if you don’t have a medium through which those ideas can travel, it doesn’t matter.”

Likability matters more in some roles

Still, pure likability has its limits, said Tom Chi, who has worked at Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, and who is a founding partner of At One Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC firm.

That’s because, for many roles, there are “real, quantitative performance metrics” — things like how many lines of code someone has checked in, he said.

“It’s actually relatively straightforward to tell whether you’re adding a lot to the team,” Chi said.

The tech world has plenty of examples of the “brilliant jerk” — that talented colleague who rubs others the wrong way, but gets away with it because of their skills or smarts.

“That’s a deep part of tech culture,” he said.

Where likability might play a more significant role, Chi said, is in roles such as product management or design, which center on coordinating with colleagues, building consensus, or working with customers. In those cases, he said, likability and friendliness tend to matter more, he said. Because amiable traits are ultimately demonstrations of competence.

“That’s what merit looks like in that type of role,” he said.

At the same time, Chi said, workers who focus too much on being likable are at risk.

“If one wanted to prioritize that over developing merit, then I think you’re in for a bad ride,” he said.

That hasn’t deterred the anonymous coder.

“Does everyone like you?” he said. “That’s how you survive in Big Tech right now.”

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at tparadis@businessinsider.com or Signal at tparadis.70. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• Ghislaine Maxwell, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and Luigi Mangione all have different Thanksgiving day menus.
• Only one of these newsworthy inmates will be served a drumstick, considered a potential weapon.
• The other two must eat warmed-over, pre-cut turkey slices — with a spork.

Ghislaine Maxwell, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and Luigi Mangione are all spending Thanksgiving in federal lockup this year.

It’s the fifth Turkey Day behind bars for Maxwell, who’s serving a 20-year sentence for trafficking women and girls to Jeffrey Epstein. It’s the second year behind bars for music mogul Combs, who’s serving four years for transporting sex workers, and the first for Mangione, accused in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Each will eat their prison poultry at the ungodly hour of 11 a.m., the universal time across the federal system for the main hot meal of the day. Talk about an Early Bird special.

But because these newsworthy inmates are housed at three different federal facilities, they’ll each experience different menus and table settings.

These differences are nothing to shake a spork at.

Thanks to her surprise move this summer to a Texas “Club Fed,” Maxwell will enjoy for the first time this year the privilege of eating her holiday turkey with the full complement of prison cutlery: a plastic fork, knife, and spoon.

The same goes for Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and former “Real Housewives” star Jen Shah, who are also housed at the same facility, and anyone else at one of the country’s more than 70 federal prison camps, which feature the lowest level of security.

Everyone else in a federal lockup? Sporks.

“Anybody who’s not in a camp is not going to get a plastic knife,” prison consultant Sam Mangel told Business Insider. “They’re going to get a spork, something that can’t be used as a weapon.”

Here’s another special privilege for camp residents, if one can call it that: Thanksgiving drumsticks to go with the standard prison fare of mashed potatoes with gravy and mixed vegetables.

Only at the camps do they trust inmates with what Mangel called “turkey on the bone.” Everywhere else, it’s “turkey roast,” which Mangel says is a euphemism for warmed-over pre-sliced turkey.

“The bones can be fashioned into weapons,” he explained of the drumstick disparity.

The drumsticks are “a step up in the trust level,” said Mangel, a former federal camp inmate himself.

Also, they’re sizeable — “six to nine inches long,” he said. And the prison ovens do crisp up the skin quite nicely, he said.

There’s a drawback, though.

“The drumsticks, I can tell you from experience, tended to be filled with, you know, tendons,” Mangel said. “While they looked good, there was just a nominal amount of meat on them.”

“It’s not top grade by any means,” he added, speaking of all the turkey options.