Reason for rejection: iced coffee.
Recently, a recruiter posted on social media that young candidates were showing up to interviews with iced coffee and that it was disrespectful to their potential employers. That indicated a casual tone, like the whole interview was just one more errand to run that day.
I wouldn’t judge if a candidate showed up with an iced coffee. Unless they showed up late mumbling something about “traffic” while swirling their iced latte.
A friend recently sent me her schedule for an in-person interview. She was supposed to meet with six people over the span of four hours. At that point, you almost need iced coffee for sustenance during a marathon interview session.
Iced coffee aside, what bothers me about the whole conversation is that it is just one more obstacle that job seekers need to overcome while looking for work.
It is no longer enough to look polished and professional, have a strong resume, and know how to answer key interview questions. You also need to know individual biases and company-specific cultural expectations before walking through the door.
I once worked at a place where we hired two people for the same job, back-to-back. They both had the same name, and neither one worked out. One actually left the company in spectacular fashion, but that’s a story for another post.
So when it came time to fill the position for the third time, you better believe that resumes with that name were immediately disqualified.
My boss would simply say: “not again.”
Some of those candidates had very good resumes, yet they were rejected for having the wrong name at the wrong time.
I’ve seen candidates dismissed for being unemployed three months after a layoff. For being too excited about the company. For touching their hair too much during the interview.
None of these things reveal anything about whether a candidate can or can’t perform the work, yet these biases persist.
I was once looking through resumes with my boss. We were adding one more member to the team. I pointed at an interesting candidate, and she quickly set it aside by saying: “I would never hire someone with a two-page resume.”
I was surprised because I had a two-page resume, and she had hired me.
I told her and she didn’t believe me. I had to dig a copy of my old resume from my files to prove it to her.
Job seekers are told to prepare, yet how can you prepare for biases that are arbitrary, inconsistent, and only sometimes enforced? The rules of interviewing are not even rules anymore. They are preferences that change depending on who is sitting across the table or on the other side of the Zoom.
Somewhere behind the wrong name and the two-page resume, there might be the right person for the job. Everything else is just iced coffee.
