Page 110 - James Caan - Get the Job you Really Want

di≠erence, whether in fact the interview should be all about
you as a professional, focusing solely on your experience and
whether or not you can do the job. The problem is that as
an interviewer I am going to see ten or fifteen people and,
in the process of elimination, most of the decisions I make

are unconscious. I know that I have to make a decision and
after the interview, once you have walked out of the door,
it is always the things that were wrong that stand out. As

I am reflecting on the range of candidates I have seen, I will
unfortunately remember the guy with the crumpled and
frayed suit, and think to myself, ‘Mmm, he’s not our kind of
guy.’ I’m not expecting him to have kitted himself out with a
bespoke suit from Savile Row’s finest, but to have nipped into

somewhere like Marks and Spencer and picked up one of their
relatively inexpensive but good-looking suits – that’s all.
It is important to understand not just the look of the

organization but the nature of the job you are applying for.
If you walk in for a job that is going to pay £30,000 a year, and
there you are sporting a Patek Philippe watch or carrying five
grand’s worth of handbag and jewellery, I will automatically be
thinking, ‘This feels wrong.’ Trained interviewers will pick those

things up.
Rightly or wrongly, we have a perception of people in
certain positions. I always have an image of a male investment

manager: he is not fashionable, he is not casual, he is supposed
to be taken seriously. I don’t expect to see an investment
manager wearing a casual button-down shirt. If he is not what
a client thinks he should be, he has to work that little bit harder

98 get the job you really want