This Is How to Get Your Next Job

#6: Don’t Wear Jeans, Stretch Pants, Leggings, or Shorts

How you present yourself to Ginny Baldridge, an executive image consultant in St. Louis, matters. Yet, when she interviewed a man in his 50s for a public relations job, he seemed unconcerned. “He appeared for the interview wearing jeans, an extremely wrinkled golf shirt, and rubber-soled brown deck shoes with white socks,” she says.

“I was completely taken aback that the woman who submitted a wonderfully professional and polished resume would come to an interview dressed like she was going to clean out her basement,” says Dianne Daniels, small-business owner.

He was also carrying “a cheap, nylon briefcase” and had a spiral-bound notebook—“the type a third-grader would carry.”

She was ...