The internet has spent the past week debating whether you should bring an iced coffee to a job interview, which is perhaps inevitable when work culture meets social media. Give us a plastic cup, a straw and an unwritten workplace rule, and suddenly we’re debating what professionalism looks like and how hiring decisions get made.

This debate exposes an uncomfortable contradiction in modern hiring. Employers increasingly say they want to hire for skills and competencies. Yet candidates are still expected to pass another test, one that is rarely written into the job description: Do you know how someone who belongs here is supposed to behave?

And because that second test has no formal scoring system, ordinary behaviors can carry more weight than intended. A routine choice can become shorthand for qualities like judgment or self-awareness, even when the connection is unclear.

The debate took off after recruiter Caitlin Wehniainen said candidates, particularly Gen Z candidates, had been arriving at interviews carrying iced coffees or lattes. To her, the drink could make an interview look like another stop on a candidate’s errand list and feel too casual for the buttoned-up companies she recruits for. The response was swift: some people agreed candidates should understand the occasion, while others wondered why anyone entrusted with hiring decisions paid so much attention to a beverage.

How Small Impressions Become Hiring Judgments

Interviewers may notice that a candidate seems too casual, too rehearsed, too quiet or too enthusiastic. Qualities like judgment, maturity and professionalism may matter for the job, but assessing them can leave room for personal expectations about how a strong candidate should present and behave.

This creates what we might call an inference gap: the distance between what an interviewer actually observes and what they conclude that behavior says about the candidate. The wider the gap, the more room there is for bias.

A 2024 study published in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment involving 680 professional interviewers in the U.S., U.K. and Canada offers a useful illustration. Researchers examined how interviewers responded to potentially biasing information about candidates. They found that interviewers could rationalize potentially biased judgments using reasoning that appeared job-related.

That inference gap creates a particular tension at a moment when employers say they are trying to make hiring more about demonstrated ability. In January 2026, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that 70% of employers participating in its Job Outlook 2026 survey used skills-based hiring, up from 65% the previous year. Among employers using the approach, 87% said they applied it during interviews.

If interviews are where skills-based hiring happens most often, employers need to know when they are assessing a skill and when they are reacting to an impression.

Structured Interviews Put More Distance Between Impressions And Decisions

In an impression-driven interview, the conversation goes where it goes. One candidate reminds the interviewer of a successful former employee. Another is easy to talk to. A third arrives with an iced coffee and seems too casual. By the end, the interviewer may know whom they liked without knowing how much of that preference reflects the candidates’ ability to do the job.

A structured interview creates more discipline around that decision. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management defines structured interviews as assessments of job-related competencies in which candidates are asked the same predetermined questions in the same order and their responses are evaluated using the same rating scale and standards.

An impression-driven interview gives considerable weight to the interviewer’s interpretation of the person sitting across the table. A structured interview asks the interviewer to collect comparable evidence about each candidate and evaluate it against criteria established before meeting them.

Structure doesn’t eliminate human judgment. It gives interviewers criteria to apply.

Instead of “She seemed like she had good leadership potential,” an interviewer has to identify what the candidate said or did that demonstrated leadership. Instead of “He didn’t seem polished enough,” the interviewer has to connect that assessment to a defined competency and evidence from the interview.

Guidance published by the U.K.’s Office for Equality and Opportunity in March 2026 similarly recommends structured interviews as an evidence-informed way to reduce bias. The guidance points to standardized questions, predetermined scoring criteria, independent scoring before panel discussion and interviewer training among practices that can make comparisons between candidates fairer.

The growing interest in skills-based hiring makes this more than an HR process debate. Employers can remove degree requirements, rewrite job descriptions around competencies and announce that they are hiring for potential. But if the final interview still comes down to which candidate intuitively feels most professional, familiar or “right,” old proxies can slip back into a supposedly skills-first process.

Candidates Still Have To Read The Room

Job seekers face an uncomfortable reality: knowing a hiring convention may be arbitrary doesn’t make the consequences of ignoring it disappear. An iced coffee may be irrelevant to one hiring manager and memorable to another. The same can be true of arriving too early, dressing more casually than expected or approaching an interview with more informality than the interviewer expects.

That makes reading the room a practical career skill . But reading the room is different from accepting every unwritten rule as a meaningful measure of talent.

  • Research the environment, not just the role. Look at how employees present themselves on the company’s website, LinkedIn page and recruiting materials.
  • Match the setting without performing a different personality. Reading the room can mean adjusting your tone or level of formality. It doesn’t require turning yourself into a corporate character for 45 minutes.
  • Pay attention to what the interview reveals about the employer, too. If an organization places heavy emphasis on unwritten rules or a narrow definition of professionalism, consider what that might mean for the day-to-day culture.

How Interviewers Can Make Interviews More About Skills

A structured interview can still feel like a conversation. The discipline comes from deciding beforehand what counts.

Identify the competencies the interview is supposed to assess and define what evidence of each competency would look like before candidates walk through the door. If “judgment” matters, for example, don’t leave five interviewers to invent five private definitions of good judgment. Decide what the skill means in the context of the job and build questions that allow candidates to demonstrate it.

Interviewers can also get more literal about their notes. “Candidate arrived with iced coffee” is an observation. “Candidate lacks professionalism” is an interpretation. The space between those two statements is the inference gap. A defensible connection may exist between the two in a particular role or context, but writing down what actually happened before assigning meaning makes that leap easier to see.

Finally, score before discussing. The U.K.’s 2026 guidance recommends that panel members score candidates independently before discussing their evaluations, a practice intended to reduce the influence interviewers can have on one another.

None of these practices promises a bias-free interview. Humans are still doing the interviewing, so subjectivity doesn’t disappear just because someone created a rubric. But structure makes interviewers show their work.

If an interviewer notices the coffee, they can notice the coffee. The discipline comes in what happens next: separating what they observed from what they assumed, then returning to the evidence that tells them whether this person can actually do the job.

The cup can stay on the table. It doesn’t need a vote.