Last Wednesday, Caitlin Wehniainen, the president of a recruitment agency in Florida, posted a video on TikTok sharing what she thought was a helpful, innocuous tip for job seekers.
Based on her observations while training young candidates, she urged Gen Z candidates not to turn up to interviews with an iced coffee in hand, because it could send the wrong message: that it’s just a “stop on your list of errands for the day,” she said. Wehniainen didn’t think much of the video and posted it in between calls with clients.
Over the next two days, however, her video went on to grow “20 different legs and run off into so many different directions,” Wehniainen said in an interview. There were angry responses, strong agreement and parodies, and even Starbucks nodded to the online moment. Some brought up other interview missteps. Others got dramatic, asking: Would you bring an iced coffee to a funeral?
As with many things online, what started as simple recruitment advice turned into a generational debate, in which Gen Z was accused of being too careless and older generations were accused of being too rigid. For many zoomers, it felt like just another hurdle in an already brutal job market.
“This conversation is just spiraling so out of control,” said Rebekah Garcia, a 26-year-old in Los Angeles, who added that she wouldn’t bring iced coffee to a job interview.
“It’s going to turn into something like with millennials, when they would say, ‘Oh, the reason you can’t afford a house is because you have avocado toast,’” Garcia said, in reference to an oft-maligned comment by a real estate mogul who suggested that the reason millennials could not buy homes was their discretionary spending choices and not the challenging housing market.
But those who agreed with Wehniainen said that if the job market was so daunting, then why would a candidate introduce the condensation of an iced drink to the table or the awkwardness of trying to take a cacophonous sip in the middle of a conversation?
Brenida Thompson, 26, who lives in Jacksonville, Fla., said that her generation was often inclined to push back against systems, but that this was perhaps a time to choose one’s battles.
“If somebody’s telling you, ‘Hey, if you come in with an iced coffee, I probably won’t take you that serious,’ you should probably listen to them,” Thompson said.
For Daniel Bennett, a content creator who runs social media for celebrities and brands, the video bubbled up on his TikTok feed at an opportune time, right as he was trying to recruit candidates for his company.
He, like many of those responding, falls somewhere in the middle: “I do think first impressions matter, if I’m being honest,” Bennett said, “but I could care less if someone walks in with an iced coffee because if they crush the interview, they crush the interview.”
He acknowledged that he worked in a creative setting and also that he had not yet seen this happen in the real world.
In a video that Bennett posted on TikTok, he asked his dad, who had been a recruiter for over three decades in more buttoned-up settings, for his thoughts.
An iced coffee “is a hard no,” his dad, Peter Bennett, said, after laughing at the question. “Professionally, you don’t bring drinks into an interview when you’re going to be talking about your background and then sipping it and slurping. What if it spills on their desk?”
On Tuesday, the “Today” show anchors Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones weighed in on what is now known as Coffeegate.
“I think this is the pacifier for a lot of young people,” Bush declared, holding up an iced coffee with whipped cream.
“Like a blankie,” Jones said, in agreement.
“Yeah, it makes them feel powerful and confident and awake,” Bush went on.
“I think I’m going to go old school and say no,” Jones said, when it comes to bringing the drink to interviews.
While Wehniainen didn’t foresee unleashing this kind of debate, she is amused by it all. “It is providing employers with a really interesting perspective,” she said. “Maybe the up-and-coming generations aren’t going to be as motivated by a 401(k) match,” she said, adding, “And maybe we need to figure out, as time goes on, how to adapt.”
In the last few days, the conversation has spiraled into other realms, with users debating — often jokingly — whether hot coffee instead of iced would seem more appropriate in an interview and other behaviors that could signal a lack of professionalism.
The difficulty of job searching for Gen Z may lead some to feel more jaded about employment, said Chelsea Acheampong, 24, which may look to outsiders like apathy.
She likened trying to land a job to being like a crab stuck in a barrel.
“There’s no jobs left,” Acheampong said, adding, “No matter what we do, we can’t even get out of this barrel.”
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