This may seem trivial, and maybe it is. On the other hand, maybe it's a sign of the class war raging in a job market that has shrunk to the size of Tom Thumb's fingernail.
The Boston Globe featured an article today on how to dress for success, the kind of article I would have expected to find in Elle or WWD. The piece showcases three young professionals, 2 female and 1 male, who wanted to advance their careers. The Globe's advice? Get new clothes.
With the economy weak and more people hunting for work every day, job candidates are thinking beyond the usual resume and references and looking for any competitive edge they can get. And that includes updating how they look. But getting the right hairstyle, choosing the right interview outfit, even deciding whether to wear cologne on the big day can be a surprisingly tricky business.
Kelly McDermott, founder of Kelly, Etc., a local wardrobe and style consulting company, says the makeover business is booming right now with recent college grads and mid-career adults intent on rethinking their wardrobes and creating a clean, polished look.
I can't post pictures here but you can click the link and see for yourself: what the "consultant" advised thr young teacher, Amy Gonzalez, to do, for instance, was spend over $800 on clothes.
Gonzalez: Coco skirt, $215; Tiber belt, $165; Mirabelle yellow shirt, $215; black and white snakeskin shoes by Maine Shoe, $270. All at Reiss. Also: crystal earrings, $6.90, at H&M.
Ms Gonzalez is in the Boston Teacher Residency program and is trying to find a job. As an English teacher. Her top starting salary would be $30K give or take and she isn't exactly, like working right now, but they expect her to find, from somewhere, nearly a $grand$ to blow on a single interview outfit. Is this really necessary? Apparently.
Increasingly, they need to. With people changing jobs frequently (a 2006 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey said the youngest baby boomers held an average of 10.5 jobs from ages 18-40), not only do they have to keep their business skills honed, but they need to keep their look and style current as well. Image consultants say job seekers must consider the type of industry they're interviewing for and follow what is often an unspoken code for how to dress.
Now, I know there have always been dress codes and that looks have always mattered even when they shouldn't. I'm not that dumb. But what struck me about this article was the unspoken assumption that clean and professional wasn't good enough any more, that you could no longer impress a potential employer, not even a school district that doesn't pay that much, with nice clothes if they came off the rack at Wal-mart or JC Penney instead of from some trendy, high-end shoppe-e. There was simply not even the usual attempt in these kinds of articles to offer less expensive alternatives that would do as well - "Dress For Success for Under $100" doesn't cut it any more.
"The idea is to try to mirror and match your prospective company," McDermott says.
(emphasis added)
IOW, "we want you to look like one of us." This is standard class discrimination, and it forces people who are perfectly competent but underpaid (a sizable chunk of our current workforce) to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on clothes to interview for jobs they may never get and even if they did wouldn't pay enough to justify the clothing expense. Because they're not going to get that job for sure unless they "look like one of us."
Yes yes, I know what she (the consultant) said were words like "professional" and "appropriate", but let's cut through all the PR bullshit. What she means by them is in the quote above: a mirror. The rich and powerful want to know you'll copy them because that's a sign of obedience. Even in the public sector, this reliance on commercial corporate values seems to have resulted in the same kind of extreme class discrimination that you used to find only in places like IBM management and the offices of NYC's top corporate legal firms.
I suppose that after the last 30 years of conservative/corporate propaganda, I shouldn't be surprised that there's no balance here, that everything is set up to force us to "mirror" our corporate betters right from the git-go. But it's a shame just the same.
Mick, as you know I've got nearly 20 years of career consulting under my belt. I don't know what that $800 outfit looks like, but if it draws attention to the interviewee, it's a crappy interview suit.
I always told my clients that the best outfit was one that no one noticed. In a teaching environment, however, an expensive suit would be a terrible mistake as the education sector does not value expensive clothing, and if they notice you spend on clothes, that's a strike against you.
Not surprising — most job hunting advice bites big time.
Posted by: Norwegianity | July 10, 2008 at 03:14 PM
I don't know if I'm relieved that that terrible advice isn't accurate or aggrieved that there are vultures out there giving crappy advice to desperate people looking for work - and charging money for it. Both, maybe.
For a moment it seemed to me that we had been so infected by corporate values that even the education sector was poisoned. I'm glad to hear otherwise but sorry that my home town paper got bamboozled by a snake-oil consultant.
(BTW, just click the link for the picture. Gonzalez is in the middle. A white blouse with puff sleaves, ruffles breast-to-neck, black below-the-knee skirt, and silver snakeskin pumps. The top is fairly conservative tho the material is obviously expensive, but the shoes would be screaming at me if I was interviewing her. And I heard a radio interview with a human resources person once who was asked what he looked for in an applicant and he said, "A lot of people look at shoes.")
Posted by: mick arran | July 10, 2008 at 05:47 PM