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How should a nice lady dress for a job interview in the increasingly competitive job market?

We all know that the way we dress to a job interview will always have an impact on the results.

But let me take the question a little further and ask if it pays for a lady attending an interview being conducted by men to expose her physical attributes to best advantage?

Such a topic is bound to draw heated debate and lots of theory. But I guess a real-life situation that conclusively tests the question with two different men is pretty much as conclusive as any test can get.

Anyway you decide for yourself. Here is the real life situation as it happened.

One day about two years ago, my boss, a very hard, cold blooded calculating businessman casually informed me that I would be in charge of interviews to fill in some new sales positions he had created in the business.

Before I go any further, let me inform you that I am extremely conservative in nature, very happily married and do not have the occasional fling, which if we believed everything we read these days, is supposed to be very normal for any full-blooded male.

It is not normal, I can assure you, it is plain immoral.

I did the job interview for two straight days, until I was sick of seeing people and my throat was hoarse from asking the same questions over and over again.

I short-listed about 10 people and finally filled the six positions, or thought that I had. I assured myself that the interviews had been very fair. I had not let my prejudice get in the way of good judgment and that the people I had selected would do well at their jobs.

Then the guilt started. I noted that a certain young lady who turned up in a red mini skirt that exposed her long legs on the day of the interview (but had since taken to dressing more conservatively) had scored quite highly in my rating, maybe way too high.

My guilt and puzzlement increased a few days later when it became very clear to me and virtually everybody else at the office that she was not capable of doing the job she had been hired to do. It had been a big mistake hiring her. A huge mistake made by yours truly, whose good judgment was probably clouded by certain circumstances at the interview. Circumstances that the young lady seems to have deliberately created with a certain clear objective in mind.

So had the man in me taken over and clouded my judgment? I did not want to admit it to myself but the more I thought about it, the more I was left with no option but to admit the unthinkable - at least in my book.

Of course because of my character and reputation at the office, a few jokes started doing the rounds.

Since at least two out of the six people I hired could not get through their first week on the job, my boss decided that he would do the next batch of interviews personally and get some quality people himself. To me the second person, who hadn't made it (a man) did not really matter. My attention was focused on the lady. That is the only mistake I had made that I now saw so clearly.

I was advised by the boss to watch him carefully and learn something, which I dutifully did.

Inevitably it happened again. My attention was drawn to a very hot lady who turned up wearing some leather boots and a short dress with a slit on the side that I though went way too high for office wear. Personally I though she had gone slightly overboard. I wanted to see what my boss' judgment would be on her.

She really did not quite have the right qualifications and features we were looking for to fill the positions. However she had previously worked with a bank in the marketing department and wanted to relocate. Even had excellent references from her previous employer.

However during the interview I could see that my boss' eyes kept on straying to the well displayed legs in front of him. But then knowing my boss I had no illusions about his judgment being clouded. Firstly from what I knew about him, this was virtually impossible and secondly, he had a point to prove and was in fact teaching me something about doing interviews and understanding human nature, as he put it.

The next morning I came to work and anxiously waited to see whether the young lady would turn up with the short-listed. Surely there was no way.

Again I sat in at the interview and the hot lady was not amongst the first four. But sure enough, she was the fifth and last of the five short listed persons. She was amongst the two that my boss took in the fill the positions.

She lasted at least one month. Again, it was very clear to all of us that she was totally inappropriate for the job at hand and I knew within the first two days that she would not make it.

Since then I have never discussed this issue with my boss or with anybody else. Until this very moment when I have recorded these amazing chain of events in this blog entry.

The big question here is, does it pay for a lady to dress in such a way that she stands out in the crowd during a job interview. And especially so when the interviews are being conducted by a man or men?

I still say that a nice lady should dress decently and especially the way she always dresses and let her resume and qualifications make her stand out.

I am aware that many women do not agree with my views but I will not change them, despite what happened two years ago. In my book there are a number of other issues in life bigger than landing the job because of the way you dressed.