I’ve rejected a person for showing up to the interview in a suit and tie, this is Tucson, we aren’t financial or a mortuary, there’s no room on the team for somebody stuffy.
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Coat and tie <> stuffy (necessarily)
For me, it is the only thing to wear to a professional interview. But I have no idea what you were interviewing for, a bouncer at a strip club? A guitar player in a punk rock band? Yea, a coat and a tie might be wrong in those situations.
Someone was demonstrating respect for the process and you reject them out of hand.
That’s funny.
I don’t know, maybe was there a competitor who looked better out of the box. Sometimes that’s how the game goes. It could say the casual guy might have been wearing formal suits too until he scoped out the office, then he went to K-Mart and switched outfits.
I can argue both for and against something with ease....
You’re from Maryland. I don’t normally poke at people’s profiles for discussion “ammo” but in this case it’s important. There are VAST cultural differences between the East and West coasts (which for this discussion includes the desert Southwest), and one of the places that really shows is in the office. The East coast is all about the suit and the tie, anybody in a vaguely professional job on the East coast is going to where them. The West coast, especially the software industry I’m in, looks on suits and ties largely with horror. I mentioned financial and mortuary sectors in that part, because out here that’s most of who where’s suits to work, add in the law and public facing government official and that’s probably 95% you’ll see wearing suits. We don’t even wear suits to weddings unless we’re in them. The CEO of my current company almost never is seen in them, and we haul in $2 billion a year.
So for being here they weren’t showing respect for the process, he was showing that his fish was not for our water. He’d have probably been a lot happier in Maryland. This dress code conflict between the coasts goes back decades. There’s a great Tom Wolfe article on the rise of Intel that touches on that issue, the day the jeans and t-shirt West coast tech guys flew to the East coast to get venture money from guys who still wore suits in the weekend at home is pretty funny.