Joseph Stoker had Netflix’s (NFLX) Big Mistakes on when his partner floated what she saw as a textbook one: a job candidate who walks into the interview holding an iced coffee. Stoker, a 40-year-old London lawyer who works in-house at a tech firm, shrugged — to him a drink said nothing about whether someone could do the job. Alicia Fairclough, 42, founder of EA How To, a global community for executive assistants, was shaken; to her it read as too casual. They argued it out for the next hour, the Journal reports.
It started last week, when Caitlin Wehniainen, a Miami-based recruiter for Fortune-500 companies, posted a TikTok about Gen Z candidates arriving with iced coffee; her gripe, she told the paper, is the sipping, the swirling, the dripping. To critics, the cup signals casualness, poor preparation and bad time management; to defenders it shows personality, and anyway, it’s a drink. The split is mostly generational. Peter Bennett, 66, a longtime Culver City, Calif., recruiter, says anyone who can’t go an hour without coffee has a problem, and the last sip belongs in the car. His son Daniel, 30, a partner at production company Kursza, doesn’t care as long as the candidate can do the job.
What the hiring side actually said
Zoë Hartsfield, 30, a Denver-based brand-agency founder, calls the debate archaic and warns the candidate you pass on over a beverage could be the next Steve Jobs. Megan Slabinski, a district president at Robert Half (RHI), says employers should set clear expectations, because a full generation of workers has never had an in-person interview. Alina Nguyen, a San Francisco recruiter who’s worked at Meta Platforms (META) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google, says a drink doesn’t mean you’re bad at the job; Kelly McCulloch of Inspire Brands, which manages Dunkin’, says it’s about skills — they’ll offer you a beverage anyway. Executive coach Alisa Cohn’s rule is timing — at 7 in the morning, why wouldn’t you? — and if you must, bring it hot: “Coffee is dressed up in a jacket, right? Iced coffee’s like a bathing suit.” Brandon Cho, 34, the Los Angeles-based head of talent at the agency Praytell, says come as you are; he’ll be carrying an iced vanilla latte with almond milk, though a piping-hot cup in 100-degree weather might earn a little judgment.
Our read
Here’s why a trivial question is worth an hour of anyone’s evening: for most working people, future earnings are the largest asset they’ll ever own, and an interview is the hour in which that asset gets repriced. That makes it a behavioral problem, not an etiquette one. The cup is cheap; the signal it sends to a 66-year-old decision-maker isn’t, and you don’t get to pick the generation across the desk. Nguyen and Bennett are both right — a drink says nothing about competence and something about reading the room. So manage the signal — finish it in the car — and spend your nerves on the questions.
For owners and managers, Slabinski’s point is the keeper: say what you expect. If a whole generation has never done an in-person interview, the candidate with the cold brew probably isn’t disrespecting you — odds are nobody told them the rules, and a good process does. That goes for dress codes, start times and every unwritten norm you’d otherwise use to reject someone who could have done the job. Write the rules down; it’s cheaper than the mis-hire.