Silly Pet Peeve

This is absolutely a silly pet peeve of mine, but it came up again today, and I feel the need to mention it.

If you are someone who wants to interview me, and you have my resume in front of you, why do you think it is necessary to tell me that I should dress professionally? As you can clearly see from my resume, I am a professional. If I don’t know how to dress for an interview, I shouldn’t be working at the level I think I should be working at.

At the same time, this does give me a clue as to the quality of candidates they normally interview, if it is just part of their standard patter to tell people how to dress. And it could be that these HR folks do a lot of interviewing for entry level positions, where people do need that advice, and not a lot for my level. Or it tells me that the job I’m going to be interviewing for is not actually at the level their help wanted ad made it sound like.

So telling me to dress professionally for the interview does give me plenty of information, but it still bugs me.

Of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum, if someone tells me I should dress casual (or business casual) for an interview, that doesn’t bother me. But that’s because I assume they’ve looked at my resume and realized that I would dress professionally and are letting me know that’s not their culture.

Funny how we give people credit for things we appreciate and don’t for things that bug us.