If These Résumés Could Talk is a new Wall Street Journal feature in which recruiters, headhunters and hiring managers share their wildest and most interesting stories. Previous installments of the series are here.

Q: What’s an instance where a job candidate made an unusual dress-code blunder?
Prescription for disaster
I sent a candidate into a major food manufacturer for a maintenance manager position, and I happened to take their director of HR to lunch that day at the exact time as his interview.

While we were at lunch, she got a call on her cellphone. I heard her say to the person on the other end, “What? He’s wearing what?” I’m thinking, Oh, this does not sound good. This has to be about my candidate. She hung up, and said, “You’re not going to believe what this guy wore to the interview.”

He was wearing a Nascar racing jacket with the name of the sponsor—Viagra—in big letters. Apparently he was a Nascar fan, and so he was proud of it!

I was dumbfounded. I had spent 30 minutes telling this guy what to wear. I didn’t know what else to say, so I said, “Well he just wanted to prove he was up for the job!” And I promised her that if she gave him another chance, he would be in a suit the next time.

All the way home from lunch, I was on the phone with this guy: “Do you realize what you just did?” He told me he didn’t have a suit. I told him to go get one.

The client invited him back a few days later, he wore a suit, and he got the job—pending a background check and drug screen.

The guy didn’t pass the drug test. When she told me, I asked the HR director, “You mean he took that much Viagra?” She said, “No it was something else.”

—Al Polson, The Colonial Group

The world’s a stage
Years ago, I worked as a consultant for a professional membership organization in New Jersey, and I was screening job candidates for an executive administrative-assistant position.

One of the candidates was a fairly recent Harvard grad with a terrific resume. The day of her interview she showed up wearing a full Elizabethan theatrical outfit, including makeup.

I was a little daunted. But I focused on the task at hand and conducted the interview. She was very interested in the job, and she mentioned that the reason why she came in like this is because she wanted anyone who hired her to know that her first love is really for the theater. I had the sense that she had a lot of these outfits. She could probably quote Shakespeare chapter and verse.

I thought this was interesting: she wanted to convey what was really important to her. But I think that was something that needed a feather, not a mallet. If she was hired and she came in to work like that, it would be highly problematic. So I did not recommend her for the job.


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