Being in the middle of a job hunt means pondering personal presentation as it relates to interviews. Get the suit out of the closet, make sure it's clean, figure out where the ties went, that whole thing. I've been working for offices where the dress code is, "funny T-shirt and jeans," for 10 years now so my dressing-up part of the closet is sadly depleted from when I worked in a business casual environment. Thus, thinking about presentation.
If you've been laboring under the assumption that only women are subject to fashion and style dictated presentation rules, you're sadly, sadly mistaken. As a case in point, I give you the presentation of sales people trying to sell me on six-figure products and services.
WWU
People pitching me and my department knew where we fit into the world of buying things: higher education, publicly funded.
Because of this every single person that came to us to try and sell us on expensive things came in a suit, and left the suit-jacket with their bag as soon as they could.Tie optional. All of them, to a man (we never had any women in the pitch teams). They knew our buying cycle for big ticket items could be 18 months long, and that our technical higher-ups are almost always old white guys with gray hair. So they sent older white guys with gray hair to pitch to us.
Logik
Logik... we were hard to figure out. We worked in the Legal Services sector but were actually a tech startup, two dress-codes that are on opposite ends of the spectrum. You could tell how pitch-teams slotted us by watching what they wore.
- Logik is a Legal Services Firm: Suit with ties, probably older than me. Though if they came back for a second visit they left the jackets in the car.
- Logik is a Techy Legal Services Firm: Suit with tie but left the jacket in the car, about my age. Though, the lead of the pitch-team would keep the jacket. If they came for a second visit they left the ties in the car.
- Logik is a Tech Startup: Nice polo shirt with dockers, my age or younger. Never had one come for a second visit since that was always done over the phone.
All of the men had short hair, minimal facial hair, and no jewelry other than watches and a single ring. Even the teams pitching to a startup didn't let the men have facial hair.
I had exactly two women come through during my time with Logik. The first was canvasing the whole building for ISP services, so defaulted to "Suit". The second lead a pitch team serving the legal-services market in the area so also wore a suit.
The second-visit variations were always informative because by then I knew more about who was pitching me. Yes, we were legal services (sort of) and some of them outright said that a different marketing group should be serving us but they were right there and may as well get on with it. Seeing how they tuned their appearance to pitch to us was interesting.
The thing that struck me this past week and a half is that an interview is very much like those pitch teams trying to sell me on six figure expenses. Because that's what I'm doing, selling an employer on a potential six-figure ongoing annual expense (after you factor in fringe benefits like medical, 401k contribution, and employer-side social-security contributions). I find myself making the exact same presentation calculation those sales teams were making for me:
- If the job posting (or "About the team" page) says, "we don't care if you wear flip-flops to the office," find a nice non-logoed polo-shirt and my best non-suit, non-denim pants.
- If the posting is for a large national corporation and the posting and website doesn't give any clues about the corporate culture, default to assumptions based on the market the corporation works in.
- Default to suit-with-tie, unless their market is something known for down-scaling dress-codes for some reason
- Some non-profits (leave off the tie, or maybe the jacket as well)
- Serves the educational market (leave off the tie. Maybe leave off the jacket if the vibe after the phone screen suggests it's appropriate)
- Markets the company to outdoorsy types (dress-shirt and dockers)
- etc.
- Default to suit-with-tie, unless their market is something known for down-scaling dress-codes for some reason
- If the job posting is for a startup, default to dress-shirt-with-pants, unless their culture pages suggests aggressively casual; in which case go for the polo-and-dockers.
And so on.
Same problem, only I only do it every few years rather than as my day-job so I have to think about it more.
If the sales people trying to sell me stuff are anything to go by, the old dictum, "you can never go wrong doing an interview in a suit," is very much wrong.
The dictum, "dress one step classier than the place you're interviewing at," is very much born out by watching the professional sales people work. The hard part is guessing how an office dresses without having been in it at all. So pay attention, and do your research; social media is a good way to figure out what the unofficial office dress-code looks like.
Having "flip-flops OK" on a job posting is awesome, since it tells me I can get away with a polo-shirt, dockers, and dressy shoes and I don't have to do much more research.