The 'Iced Coffee at a Job Interview' Debate is (Obviously) Not About Iced Coffee

There's a debate that has set the internet on fire, and it's all about iced coffee at a job interview.

It all started when a recruiter made a video about certain unprofessional behaviors she's observed among Gen Z job seekers. "My Gen Z candidates are showing up to the interviews with iced coffee, iced lattes in hand," she said.

And the Internet went wild.

Many people find it absolutely revelatory that you probably shouldn't roll up to a job interview with a drink. Others are on the side of..."yeah of course? It's about decorum?".

It is, to some extent, shaping up to be a Millennial vs. Gen Z argument, and as a Millennial, I tend to side with my side on this one: I think walking in to a job interview with any type of drink feels too casual for a setting that commands a certain level of formality. Some people feel there's an element of misogyny at play because iced coffee tends to be popular among the girlies, and...okay, maybe there's something there? Others argue that people of color typically have the situational awareness needed to see why this isn't something you should do, I'd agree: As minorities, we know that it's so easy to discredit us, so we take these standards of behavior seriously.

Of course, none of this is really about iced coffee. It's about social awareness and decorum and professionalism — and it's also about an obvious shift in all these things. In a post-Covid world, I think we've just lost touch with these intricacies of human behavior. And that's why Gen Z is reacting so differently to this: They didn't have the luxury of experiencing early adulthood in person. We're spending so much time on our devices, it's affecting how we show up in the world and our ability to perceive situations.

The question is, what do we do about this? How do we maintain intergenerational connections and alliance for the sake of our future? I think we do it by trying to understand why this is happening in the first place. Social norms can and should change over time, but situational awareness...that matters. Our ability to asses without rules being explicitly communicated to us matters.

Many people are calling out the "unwritten rules" around things like not bringing food or drink (yes, that includes iced coffee) to an interview and...yeah. That's kind of the point; we should be able to apply a level of judgement to these situations. We should be able to understand that the energy we bring to a job interview is different than the energy we bring to hang out with our friends, yet in a social media-driven world, this type of nuance is getting lost. People argue that they don't want to a job if they can't bring a coffee to the office. What they fail to realize is that an interview is not the same as showing up to work, just like a casual brunch is not the same as a wedding. Different situations demand different approaches...and we can't afford to lose sight of that.