Every luxury job specification lists the same qualifications: three years on a comparable floor, clienteling experience, a second language if you are lucky. None of them lists the thing that actually separates the candidates, because nobody has found a defensible way to write it down. We hire for taste. We simply do not say so on the posting.
What taste is not
It is not style. Some of the best advisors we have placed dress plainly and drive old cars. It is not wealth, or proximity to it — a career spent inside luxury confers nothing automatically. And it is certainly not the ability to name a collection, which is knowledge, teachable in a fortnight and worth exactly what knowledge is worth.
Taste is also not agreement. A room where everyone shares the same references is not a room with taste. It is a room with a habit.
What taste actually is
Our definition, after enough placements to have tested it: taste is judgment about proportion. Knowing what to leave out.
On a sales floor it looks unremarkable and is almost impossible to fake. It is the client advisor who senses that someone came in to be left alone, leaves them alone, and reappears at the precise moment they did not know they wanted help. It is the advisor who does not push the second piece because the first one was right — and who understands that the sale not pressed is the reason that client returns in March. It is the visual merchandiser who takes the third object off the plinth.
Restraint, in other words, at speed. Every one of those decisions is made in under two seconds, with nobody to consult, and it is made correctly or it is not made at all.
Why the résumé is blind to it
A CV records what someone has done, and taste is visible only in what they declined to do. There is no line item for the upsell not attempted, the display not cluttered, the follow-up email not sent. The document is structurally incapable of showing the thing we most want to see.
Worse, it rewards the opposite. A CV rewards volume — targets exceeded, clients added, stores opened. All of it useful. None of it distinguishes the advisor who built a book from the one who burned through a database.
So we treat the CV as a filter for competence and nothing more. It tells us someone can do the job. It never tells us whether they belong on your floor.
How we screen for it
Three signals, none of which sound like an interview question.
- The sale they walked away from. Everyone has one. The candidate with taste remembers it precisely, describes it without drama, and can say why it was the right call. The other kind cannot recall one — because there was not one.
- What they would take off the floor. Given their last store, what single thing would they remove? The answer reveals whether they see a room or a shelf. People with taste are specific, and slightly uncomfortable answering, because they know it is a judgment on someone else's work.
- The interview itself. How much space do they take? Do they finish our sentences? Do they know when a conversation is over? Reading a room across a table and reading one on a Saturday in December are the same faculty.
None of that is scientific and we will not pretend otherwise. It is trained judgment, applied on your behalf — which is the actual reason to work with a specialist recruiter rather than a job board.
The uncomfortable part
Taste cannot be trained the way product knowledge can. We say that plainly, because the comfortable alternative — telling a house that any hire can be coached into it — costs them a year and a client book. Someone with taste and no product knowledge is six weeks from excellent. Someone with product knowledge and no taste is already everything they are going to be.
That has a hiring consequence and a pay consequence. Hire for the faculty and teach the catalogue. Then accept that people who have it know they have it — they may never use the word, but they know what they are worth, and they will read your offer against the market with the same precision they use on the floor.
We will never put "taste" in a job specification. It would be insufferable, and it would attract exactly the wrong people, which amounts to the same thing. But it is why two candidates with identical résumés are not the same hire — and it is what we are listening for in every conversation we have.
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