Q&A: Tie or no tie? What should you wear to a job interview?

Hi guys, in today's post, I shall deal with a simple question from a young man (let's call him 'Marius') who is about to have a job interview. "Hi there Alex, I am a graduate who is looking for work at the moment and have a job interview coming up. I have a question about what I should wear - it is an IT company, so I am wondering if I need to dress up? You know how companies like Google, Facebook and Youtube are super laid back and dressed down in terms of their corporate cultures, like people show up in their boardrooms dressed in jeans and T-shirts for meetings. I want to prove that I am keen and my mother said I should wear a tie - but I felt that could come across badly, I have done so much research and homework into this company and it is so not a suit and tie kinda place. So, can you tell me what I ought to do - do I default to convention and wear a tie because it is a job interview, or do I show up in jeans and T-shirt and risk making a bad impression? I'm not sure if there's a right answer to this but I'd like to get your opinion. Thank you."

Can Marius turn up for his interview dressed like this?

That's a good question Marius and I would suggest the following: do a bit of spying. Firstly, go to the company's website and see if you can get a feel of the corporate culture in there - there is a difference between smart casual and completely casual: yes there are some companies where people are completely dressed down. When I worked in Google, so many guys showed up for work in jeans and a hoodie - that was almost like a uniform there and ironically, the pressure to conform was just as strong as when I worked in banking and everyone had to wear a suit and tie. I gave in and wore a hoodie as well when I worked there because I wanted to blend in, be part of the team. Secondly, if their office is not too far from where you live, you could even have a look at their office to see what the people are wearing in the office - I understand that this may not always be possible (say you may not be able to gain access to the office block), but you can always do a Google image search on the members of staff or even look them up on websites like Linkedin. After you gain the information you need, you should try to blend in by dressing like them.

There is another aspect to this however, that is to be yourself. I always show up for my meetings in a suit and tie because I'm Mr Corporate - I hated wearing a hoodie for work when I was working at Google and I feel so much more comfortable in a suit and tie. My CTO (Chief Technology Officer) once asked me if he should wear a suit to a meeting and I said to him, of course not - to which he replied, well you're wearing a suit, so why shouldn't I? I explained that I was being myself and he should be himself and turn up in a jeans and hoodie, like most IT experts do. Our outfits are as mismatched as they come, but it does demonstrate the diversity in our team and when we meet our clients and business partners, they know whom they are dealing with as we are almost playing to our stereotypes. In fact, I told my CTO never to wear a suit and tie to a meeting because I don't want him to make the Addison Lee fashion faux pas.

The Addison Lee Driver look

Addison Lee is one of London's biggest private taxi companies - their drivers do not have a uniform but have a dress code: the men have to wear a suit and tie. But no, the company does not pay for the suit and the drivers have to find one themselves. Now many Addison Lee drivers are actually from Eastern Europe - the work is not well paid and thus many companies like that recruit their drivers directly from places like Romania and Bulgaria. So their drivers are often wearing the nastiest looking 1980s Communist era suits that they have brought over from Bucharest, Sofia or some other depressed small town in Eastern Europe as these people cannot afford to spend hundreds of pounds on a fashionable new suit. So when you see a man wearing an ugly suit driving a rather nice looking car in London, he is most probably an Addison Lee driver. It is perhaps a somewhat unkind stereotype of Eastern European drivers - but when a man commits fashion crime by wearing an ugly, unfashionable suit, we would joke that he is an Addison Lee driver. And that's why I tell my CTO, he didn't want to risk looking like an Addison Lee driver if he clearly didn't like wearing a suit and tie. What is the point of wearing a suit when you just look oh so wrong in it?

I wouldn't worry too much about overdressing - like if you show up in the office wearing a tie and clearly, nobody in there is even wearing a shirt with a collar, then just go to the toilet and take off the tie discretely (but don't do it in front of anyone else, as that will look too obvious and desperate). In the world of banking, it is far worse to make the opposite mistake: to underdress. There are some old fashioned institutions where you have to dress smartly to meet important clients and hence if you show up at an interview looking decidedly cheap and tacky, then you are clearly sabotaging your chances of working with people like that. The key point is to make the people interviewing you feel comfortable as they chat with you - that means mirroring them in not just the way they talk, but relating to them and creating a rapport: by that token, if you are dressing in a similar manner, than that makes them visually identify with you as well. Hence showing up in a suit and tie at an IT company with a very dressed down culture would be just as big a fashion faux pas. The penalty for turning up underdressed is far more severe than turning over overdressed.

Will you fit in or stand out at work?

Now am I making too big a deal about this - I can already here some people screaming at me for being oh so incredibly shallow and so focused on appearances, but if this job interview does mean a lot to you (and I know it does Marius), then would you want to leave anything to chance? Wouldn't you rather make sure that you do every little thing to boost your chances of success? You know, perhaps what you wear wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference, maybe it will boil down to something else together; like how you perform during the job interview process. But if the competition is very stiff and it is down to you and another candidate for the job, then at that stage, you will do anything you can just to get any little bit of advantage you can just to nudge you over the finish line first. How would you feel if the other guy got the job because you were stubborn about what to wear to a job interview?

Finally, you need to think about the kind of corporate culture the company possesses - do not mistake casual dress code to be a relaxed environment where you can simply take it easy. Far from it - from my time working at Google, I can tell you that people work extremely hard and long hours, even if they are extremely casually dressed. How would conforming to this group of people make you feel? If you do want to identify with them and aspire to be like them, then you wouldn't think twice about conforming as it would make you feel very happy and comfortable. Is there any room for you to be yourself if that means being somewhat different from everyone else in the team? You see, when I worked in sales, there was plenty of room to be yourself as long as you delivered. People cared far more about your sales figures than your attire, as the wise Deng Xiaoping famously one said, "不管白猫、黑猫，逮住老鼠就是好猫". ("Regardless whether you are a white cat or a black cat, as long as you can catch the mice, you are a good cat.")

Would you prefer to work in an environment with that kind of 不管白猫、黑猫 culture, or would you be happy to conform? Personally, I felt quite uncomfortable about conformity as it was not in my nature, it was not in my character to conform. And of course, conformity extends way beyond what you wear: for example, in some companies, there is a drinking culture - so in this place where I worked, the colleagues would get out of the office and adjourned to the pub after work to get drunk after a hard day's work. Those of us who didn't drink or had families to rush home to see were not a part of that 'bonding' process and thus were some excluded from the kind drunken camaraderie that was forged  in the pub. Then I also worked in another company where my colleagues tended to me married with children, so it was understood that the moment we got off work, everyone would rather go home to see their families after a long day in the office. It is the way the rest of the colleagues respond to the person who doesn't conform that really matters: do they just shrug their shoulders and say, oh well, or do they ostracize him for being different?

So there you go Marius, I have covered more than just your original question in this post but I hope you have found it useful nonetheless. If you have any other questions about the issue, please do let me know (and I'm sure my readers will have their opinions as well on this topic). So Marius, the best of luck for your job interview and thanks for reading.