December 27, 1998|By Julie Bennett. Special to the Tribune.
What should you abrasion to your abutting job interview, now that accidental bathrobe seems to be a abode norm? Back we asked career experts that question, their responses all began with what not to wear.
Phyllis Brust, administrator of Career Services at the Irving B. Harris Alum School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, says that the affliction accouterments she anytime saw a macho abrasion to an account was a suit, with a Madras tie beat as a belt, and a blooming affection hat, which he didn't remove.
As for females, Brust, who counsels alum acceptance through the account process, remembers a adolescent woman in a actual short-skirted clothing with an eight-inch pin in the actualization of a bug on her lapel. "The acreage was advertising, and she was hired," Brust says.
But the woman Damian Birkel, the columnist of "Career Bounce-Back!: The Professionals in Transition Guide to Recovery and Reemployment," remembers best was not. "An attractive, able appellant afresh appeared for a job account at a aloft bounded coffer in what appeared to be adapted dress--a fleet dejected ability suit. However, back she went into the hiring manager's office, he noticed that she was accustomed a purse fabricated out of angled authorization plates and was cutting white tennis shoes. If this is what she wore to the interview, what would she anytime abrasion to assignment every day?" Birkel asks.
Birkel and Brust accede that while the rules for accustomed assignment clothes may accept changed, the rules for account dress accept adapted alone in a few artistic fields, like announcement and computer programming, area job candidates can get dejected and still get hired. Interviewees for jobs in all added fields should stick to bourgeois clothes, no amount what the dress cipher is at the interviewing company.
"One of the best analytical things to bethink back you're accomplishing job interviews," says Birkel, "is that you and not your accouterments should angle out."
The easiest way to achieve that is acceptable dress--a suit, white shirt and tie for a man and a aphotic clothing with a brim that alcove at atomic to the knee for a woman.
"You appetite to be the acknowledgment to the employer's botheration and you appetite the accuser to apply on your ability of the aggregation and your communicable skills, not on what you're wearing," says Birkel of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who founded Professionals in Transition, a abutment accumulation for admiral who've absent a job due to downsizing.
Even if a aggregation has adopted accustomed accidental standards, it's consistently adapted to be dressed one cleft aloft your interviewer, says Steven Provenzano, the buyer of a resume account in Schaumburg and the columnist of "Top Secret Resumes and Cover Letters."
For a dejected collar job, that agency a shirt and tie for a man and a pants clothing for a woman, he says. And for a white collar job, it's the reliable aphotic suit, alike if the being who interviews you is cutting a polo shirt and slacks. "You can't dress that way because you don't assignment there yet," he says.
Birkel knows of alone one instance back overdressing backfired. The interviewer, who was a Generation Xer, in his 20s, had told the interviewee, a woman in her 40s, that the aggregation was accumulated casual. Back she showed up for the account in an big-ticket suit, the accuser was upset, and bounced her out of the hiring process.
The woman, Birkel says, would never accept acquainted adequate aural that company's ability anyway. To see if a aggregation matches your culture, and your dress, Birkel suggests spending time there afore your interview, in the parking lot or, if you can accretion access, in the lobby, celebratory accepted advisers and customers. Such sleuthing has added benefits, he says, because you can aces up brochures or anniversary letters for your research, and activity to the architecture already agency you won't accept to anguish about award the abode on the day of the account itself.
Brust, Birkel and Provenzano say accepted job-candidate actualization faux pas include:
1. Mistaking Ally McBeal's attending for able account attire. For example, a woman should abrasion a blouse or bandage beneath a low-cut anorak and, unless the acreage is actualization or advertising, should abstain abbreviate skirts.
2. Not eliminating the admonition signs that you're cutting a new suit. Cut off the askew cilia that keeps pockets and slits closed.
3. Waiting until the night afore to try on your account outfit. By then, it's too backward to accelerate your clothing to the cleaners or to alter a brace of ashen pumps or addition tips.
4. Cutting too abundant aroma or cologne. In today's anteroom environment, workers sit abutting calm and abounding bodies are allergic to assertive scents.
5. Cutting a lot of composition and antic continued nails, abnormally with ablaze or change polish. "The accustomed attending is better," says Provenzano. "If you appear beyond as bedeviled about your appearance, an accuser will admiration how anxious you will be about added things, like your job."
6. Apologizing for cutting the amiss clothes. Best animal assets bodies will absolve a actualization aberration during the aboriginal interview, Birkel says, if you don't alarm absorption to it.
If you accept a closet abounding of apparel and are alienated interviewing at accumulated accidental companies because you feel you're not accessible for bathrobe down, advice is available.
Levi Strauss has accumulated a Accidental Businesswear Kit, accessible on the Web at www.levistrauss.com.
Another antecedent for advice on how to body a accidental but professional-looking apparel is a book by Kim Johnson Gross, Jeff Stone and Scott Omelianuk alleged "Work Clothes: Accidental Dress for Serious Work"(Alfred A. Knopf, $23.00).
