It started with a TikTok.
US recruiter Caitlin Wehniainen, who has 16 years’ experience and works predominantly with large, traditional Fortune 500 organisations, posted about something she’d noticed: Gen Z candidates arriving at job interviews carrying an iced coffee or iced latte.
Her view was that it could make the interview appear too casual, as though it were simply another stop in a candidate’s day.
The internet had thoughts.
The debate quickly spread beyond TikTok and has since been picked up by major business media.
It caught my attention for a slightly different reason. I’m in my 50’s and I regularly walk around with an iced latte or iced long black. So I’m not convinced we can put this one down to Gen Z.
But underneath what seems like a fairly trivial debate about coffee is a much more interesting leadership question.
How many of our ideas about professionalism are actually measures of capability, and how many are simply conventions we’ve become used to?
I’ve been to plenty of meetings and interviews over the years where I haven’t been offered a glass of water, let alone a coffee.
So if someone grabs a coffee on the way and brings it into the interview, what exactly are we deciding that tells us about them?
That they’re too casual?
That they haven’t prepared?
That they don’t care enough about the opportunity?
Or are we attaching meaning to something that may have no meaning at all?
There are behaviours that absolutely matter in an interview.
Preparation matters. Being on time matters. Respect matters. Being engaged and present matters. Understanding the environment you’re walking into matters.
But drinking an iced coffee?
I’m not sure that tells us very much about whether someone can actually do the job.
And there’s another side to this conversation that I think is being overlooked.
An interview works both ways.
While an organisation is forming an impression of the candidate, the candidate is forming an impression of the organisation.
How were they greeted? Were they made to feel welcome? Was the interviewer prepared? Did the meeting start on time? Were they offered something as simple as a glass of water?
If we’re going to scrutinise the small signals candidates send us, perhaps we should be equally conscious of the signals we’re sending them.
This goes well beyond recruitment.
Leaders make judgements every day about what someone should wear, how they should communicate, what ambition should look like, how committed people should appear and what constitutes “professional” behaviour.
Some of those expectations exist for good reason. Others may simply be inherited rules we’ve never thought to question.
And that’s the part of the iced coffee debate that interests me.
It’s easy to confuse “that’s not how I would do it” with “that’s not professional.”
They’re not necessarily the same thing.
Perhaps the better question for leaders is this:
Are we assessing what genuinely matters, or are we assessing how closely someone conforms to our version of what professional looks like?
What are your thoughts? Would someone bringing an iced coffee into an interview influence your first impression of them?
I’ll be over here with my iced latte!
