Presentation
Vetting catches what it can. Systems catch what vetting misses.
Her cover photo was the moment I knew we were not hiring her.
Naked. Folded over the back of a sofa with her arms draped along it. A man behind her, his hands placed just enough across her front to keep the post from being taken down. Stripper-grade staging dressed up as artistic license. The caption underneath, and I’m cleaning this up, was a defiant declaration that who she slept with and how was nobody’s business.
She had walked into our interview an hour earlier and nailed it. Warm. Articulate. Said all the right things about animals, about safety, about why she loved the work. On paper and in person, she was a yes.
Then we did what we always did. We pulled up her socials.
It was shocking. To be blunt.
Not because anyone cares what a grown woman does on her own time. Because this was the digital storefront she was using to apply for a job that would put her alone, overnight, inside our clients’ homes.
We did not hire her.
I thought about that interview this week when I read a note from Dr. Taylor Burrowes, who writes The Sweet Spot on Substack and brands herself, fittingly, as The Vetting and Compatibility Specialist.
Different industry. Identical pattern.
A young woman in Taylor’s local nanny group posted her hire-me pitch with sultry modeling photos. Taylor commented, kindly, that the photos were beautiful but not appropriate for childcare work. The applicant DM’d her threatening to have her removed from the group. Then a chorus of other aspiring nannies piled on. Wives were jealous. Husbands were predators. Common sense was bigotry. Half of them, it turned out, were moonlighting on OnlyFans.
Not one of them could hear the actual point.
Here is the actual point, and it cuts across every service industry that puts a stranger inside a client’s home.
How you present yourself is information. It is the first thing anyone considering trusting you with their pets, their children, their keys, or their property will see. And it is doing the talking before you ever open your mouth.
This is not about modesty. A woman can post whatever she wants on her own page. That is her right and nobody is taking it. Some of these applicants are young, broke, and imitating exactly what social media has rewarded their entire adult lives. The platform taught them this is how you get attention, and they learned the lesson well.
But attention is not the same as trust. The page itself is a pitch. Every public profile is a pitch. And if your pitch for a job inside someone’s home looks identical to your pitch for a paid subscriber site, you have not been wronged when clients pass. You have been understood.
Now let me be honest about my own record.
I spent years building and scaling a service business that put my team inside clients’ homes every day. We ran background checks. Not the twenty-nine-dollar online specials. The premium ones, marketed as FBI-grade, that cost us serious money per hire. We used e-verify. We pulled socials, we did multiple interviews, we trial-ran candidates before they ever saw a client home alone. I now coach other service business owners through the same decisions, and I tell every one of them the same thing I am about to tell you.
We still got it wrong sometimes.
We hired a woman who was magnificent on paper and in person. Calm, capable, the kind of presence that made you exhale. Her resume included a stretch as a K9 trainer for a local police department. The credentials were the kind most service owners would treat as a stamp of approval and move on. On an overnight pet sitting assignment in a client’s home, she drank a full bottle of vodka from their liquor cabinet. The client found out the way clients always find out. We rebuilt the relationship over the next two years. The hire was a closet alcoholic, and none of our systems caught it because none of our systems were built to catch what someone has not yet shown you.
A bad hire in this industry is not just a trust problem. It is a liability problem. It is an insurance claim, a license risk, a lawsuit waiting to find a plaintiff. The cost of getting this wrong scales fast.
Vetting is not a guarantee. It is a filter. It catches what it can catch and it misses what it misses, and the work of running a real business is what you build to handle the misses.
The single most powerful tool we ever introduced was a dress code.
No shorts. Leggings or capris were fine. A branded shirt with our company logo. Closed-toe athletic shoes, always. That was it.
It changed everything. It neutralized the question of what was appropriate before anyone had to ask it. It signaled to clients that a professional was walking through their door, not a stranger off the internet. It protected our team from being sized up the moment they arrived. It protected our clients from awkwardness they should not have to manage. And it protected the business from a thousand judgment calls about whether a particular outfit was too much.
I am a fan of school uniforms for the same reason. I have attended schools that required them and schools that did not. The uniform schools removed an entire layer of social pressure that the other schools quietly tolerated. Branded apparel does the same thing for a service business. It is a neutralizer. It takes a variable that can quietly sink you and removes it from the equation.
A dress code is a system. A social media review is a system. A trial run is a system. A clear written policy on what gets someone removed from your roster is a system. Every one of these is built before you need it, so that when you need it, the answer is already on the page.
The hires we regretted were not failures of judgment. They were failures of system. You do not outgrow the need for new systems. You earn them.
Before I grew a business in the pet world, my career put me in rooms with dignitaries, principals, and the staff who run alongside them. There is a saying that follows you everywhere in that world.
“We serve at the pleasure of the president.”
It is not a throwaway line. It is the operating philosophy. You are there because someone with the authority to choose has chosen you, and that choice can be revoked at any moment. Your job is to honor the trust while it is yours.
I drilled a version of that into our team for years. We serve at the pleasure of our clients.
They invite us into their homes. Sacred, inner, personal spaces. They hand us their keys, their alarm codes, their routines, and the animals they love most in the world. We become, briefly, an extension of their family. That is not a small thing. It is the thing.
You violate that trust in any way, by clothing, messaging, actions, presentation, presence, and you are not just costing yourself a client. You are reflecting on the entire team. This is not a you show. It is an us business. The privilege of being the primary caretaker for someone’s animals while they are away exists because we have earned the right to be there, and we keep earning it every single visit.
Build a team that understands this in their bones, and you will rarely need to chase business. Word of mouth in service industries does not move on advertising. It moves on the felt sense clients have when they walk back through their front door and everything is exactly as it should be.
That feeling is the product. Everything else is logistics.
This same standard applies to every person you bring into your business orbit. The bookkeeper. The virtual assistant. The contractor. The referral partner. The coach you are considering hiring.
Vet them the same way. Look at how they show up online. Look at how they handle disagreement. Look at the gap between the pitch deck and the public profile. The principle does not change because the title does.
And while you are at it, look at your own.
Pull up your own profile right now and ask what it is pitching. Not what you wish it pitched. Not what you remember posting last year. What does it say to a stranger, in the first three seconds, about whether you are someone to trust?
Good presentation in this industry is not complicated. Clean. Recognizably human. Evidence of competence and care. Photos of the work. Photos of you doing the work. Words that sound like a person who takes the work seriously.
That is the bar. It is not high. Most people clear it without thinking.
Vetting is not optional, and it is not cruel. It is the work. You are not a bad person for looking at someone’s public presentation, asking for references, or requiring a uniform. You are a responsible one.
And if you are the one being vetted, your presentation is the pitch. Your socials are the pitch. The way you respond to feedback is the pitch.
You do not get to opt out of being read. You only get to decide what you are giving people to read.
Always be vetting. Always be worth being vetted. And build the systems that catch what your eyes will miss.
If this resonated, subscribe to The Jenn Files. I write about business, money, resilience, and grit — cutting through the noise so you can build something that can’t be broken.
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