The importance of looking good when you’re down & out

Ever meet a job hunter who looks like he’s been living in a box? Day old scruff, rumpled clothes, a generally look of disarray? Clearly, it’s a bad idea to look homeless if you’re looking for work. While it may elicit sympathy, it demonstrates to people that you have lost control, and that’s never attractive.

Individual job hunters should know this, though many don’t, but corporations seem entirely clueless about it.

I’ve been to meetings lately where the bathrooms don’t have enough toilet paper and the sinks don’t all work. Where boxes are piled up in the entrance and there’s either a part-time receptionist or no receptionist at all. Where lights have gone unfixed and mail has gone unsorted and never seems to get to executives on time. Some businesses are always run this poorly, but lately a lot more have joined the ranks of the scruffy, as a result of killing so-called support personnel or “non essential staff.”

But what is essential? We’re in a depression (a recession if you’re a blind optimist) and what people consider essential is a topic of great debate. Do we need to eat out? Do we need to go on that vacation? A lot of these questions are easy to answer, but in a corporate environment they become more complicated. In war, supply lines are essential. Keeping your office up to snuff – paper in the printers, working lights, working faucets – isn’t arbitrary: these are your supply lines.

Sure, having a receptionist can be a luxury, but if you’ve designed your office so that the receptionist is the first person to greet clients, what kind of a message are you sending by having a big hole where that receptionist once sat? Isn’t that like showing up for an interview with no shirt on? “Oops! I ran out of laundry.”

Or would you wear a shirt with a missing button? What does it say if the faucets don’t work and the toilet paper isn’t replaced more than twice a week? It says that you don’t care about your own people, your employees. If you don’t care about them how much do you care about clients? For visiting clients, that’s the equivalent of going out to eat and finding a dirty bathroom at the restaurant. Bathrooms are easy to clean. Kitchens aren’t. What does it mean if the bathroom is foul? It means cancel your order and get out quick!

Even in good times it’s a dumb idea to skimp on simple issues of quality. If you let little things go – a broken light, a printer that never seems to function – your employees get a very clear message: details don’t matter to you. Typically, if a company doesn’t care about its own appearance, it usually cares little about the quality of its products. Employees are surprisingly protective of clients and a poor aesthetic is just as pernicious in an office as it is on the streets: when people see graffiti and broken glass they assume a certain level of chaos and a neighborhood gets a bad reputation. It’s the same with a company.

Times are tough, but managers can always take pride in running a quality, detail-oriented business. Your office is part of your marketing. Don’t dress it like a homeless person.