by Michael Skinner

Created on: February 05, 2010   Last Updated: March 13, 2010

1. Know Your Audience

One of biggest problems I have had as concerns attire at IT interviews is when a recruiter says I should show up in a suit and tie.  Fortunately, I never take such advice.  It has saved me the embarrassment of being interviewed by some guy in jeans whilst I am wearing white tie and tails.  Know your audience, even if your headhunter doesn't.

Unless you are trying to get hired as a stripper, a job interview is not the best time to look sexy.  Often interviewers are teams of people and the 50 year old grandmother from HR will not appreciate that low cut micro-mini.   You just lost that job.

2. Get an Iron

If you are particularly careless in the cleaning and ironing of your clothes, realize that for a trip to the dry cleaners you might get a job.  It is well worth laying out say 50 bucks to have a clean, well pressed set of clothes to get a job making $50K a year. 

If you have ever been with a group of people in a military barracks who have to take turns washing clothes, you have probably had the experience of having all your underwear come back pink because someone didn't understand that you can't wash everything all at once.  There should be no arcane or crude experiments on the laundry on the day of your interview.  It probably doesn't matter if your underwear is pink—unless you are going for that stripper job.   A white shirt, crudely dyed pink, will not cut it at many interviews.

They say you should focus on those few things you can control and the rest will take care of itself.  In this vein, the hour before a job interview is not the best time to get your mountain biking in for the day.  If you arrive at the interview sweaty and stinky, they may not even want to interview you.

3.  Expect the Unexpected

It is almost impossible to leave to early for your job interview.  Take that time estimate you got from that Internet mapping site and double it.  Even if you get a little lost or run into heavy traffic, you will still be on time.  In addition, if at the last minute you realize that all your clothes got magically wrinkled when you threw them down in a pile on the floor last night, you would actually have time to run an iron over them before your left.  Plan to leave for the job interview early so that little emergencies don't become big ones.

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