Recently, the internet started fighting about an iced coffee.
Julia Munslow, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, wrote about it last month: a Miami recruiter for a Fortune 500 company posted a TikTok about Gen Z candidates showing up to job interviews holding iced coffees, and the internet split almost exactly along generational lines.
The recruiter's complaint was oddly specific. It was the sipping, the swirling, the noise and the wet hand. Then the dripping: through the lobby, up the elevator, across the reception area. There's just a lot going on, she said.
The fight reached living rooms too. Joseph Stoker, a 40-year-old in-house lawyer at a London tech firm, was watching Netflix when his partner asked what he'd think if a candidate walked in with an iced coffee. He said it wouldn't matter, because a drink says nothing about competence. His partner, Alicia Fairclough, 42, founder of EA How To, a global community for executive assistants, disagreed. It just reads as too casual. They argued about it for an hour.
The split runs through families as well. Peter Bennett is a 66-year-old executive recruiter. His view: if you can't go an hour without a coffee drink, there's a problem, so take your last sip in the car and leave it there. His son Daniel, who lives in Venice, California, couldn't care less, as long as the person can do the job.
Then there's Zoe Hartsfield, the 30-year-old founder of The Little Ghost, a brand agency in Denver. She called the whole debate archaic. Her line: They could be the next Steve Jobs that you just passed up on.
She's right. And she's wrong.
I have a confession.
I'm a boomer, born in 1960, and I've sat on my share of hiring committees. I wouldn't care about your iced coffee. A margarita, maybe, especially if you didn't bring enough to share.
But whether I'd care isn't the point. The point is that you don't know who will.
When I started practicing law 40 years ago, an older lawyer gave me advice I've passed on to every young lawyer who has worked for me. From the minute you pull into the courthouse parking lot, people are watching you. Some of them might end up on your jury. So be careful how you carry yourself, what you say in the elevator, and who might overhear you in the restroom.
A job interview is a negotiation. So is a client pitch, a budget meeting or a first sit-down with a potential partner. In every one of them, both sides are reading signals from the moment the door opens, and often before.
The people defending the iced coffee say it's a way to show personality. But look at the trade. The drink gets you almost nothing. If the wrong person reads it the wrong way, it can cost you the deal. You don't take a risk with no upside in a negotiation. Leave it in the car. Finish it in the parking lot. Bring the briefcase instead of the backpack to the meeting where you're not sure.
That doesn't mean always playing it stiff. Wear a three-piece suit to a meeting at a tech startup and you've sent a message there too, just the wrong one. The real skill is knowing the room before you walk into it. Make a few calls. Ask someone who has been there. Are they formal or casual? What do they respect, and what makes them roll their eyes? It costs you a little time and saves you from guessing.
But there's more to it. Hartsfield's point deserves a hearing too, especially if you're the one doing the reading.
If you're the hiring manager, the buyer or the senior person in the room, you're interpreting signals as well. Some of them tell you something real. BUT: others are just your own preferences dressed up as judgment.
That's worth you being honest with yourself, because a misread costs you, too. The candidate with the iced coffee might be careless. Or she might be the best hire you never made. The vendor who showed up in a hoodie might be sloppy, or he might be the one who actually knows how to fix your problem.
Everyone at the table is reading. The question is whether you know what you're sending, and whether you're right about what you're receiving.
There's more of this on this week's episode. I get into what Xi Jinping was saying with his choice of dinner suit at the White House, the one question that doomed Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, the law firm interview I'm glad I bombed, and whether the bag you bring into a meeting is working against you.
Remember: negotiation is life.
– Gene
