Posted on 10/25/2009 2:54:07 PM PDT by paltz
It’s that time of year. College seniors from around the world are graduating, and they are hitting the career world looking for a job. And the interesting thing is that most are not doing it alone. Many parents are by their Gen Y’s side and not just for support and to be a sounding board. If you are a helicopter parent who is hovering over your adult child’s job hunt and interview process, you may be hurting your child’s professional development and their chances to land the job.
Helicopter parents have not only been bombarding college campuses, they are now flying way too close to the workplace. Parents are now involved in the hiring and interview process and calling HR departments to negotiate terms for their children or to berate them for not giving their sons or daughters an offer. Parents believe they are doing their child a favor, but this behavior can actually stunt a child’s adult development and hamper their ability to think and survive on their own. The hovering is also hurting the young adult’s chances to land the job, as employers roll their eyes and pull their hair out over the barage of phone calls from parents making demands, negotiating salaries and grilling them about benefits.
This is good for my recent college graduate. I have no idea how she got her job, just happy she has one! Maybe her boss had to deal with helicopter parents and so they hired my kid. People need to get a life!
Sure. I’m all over Baghdad.
Short of teaching the kids how to commit armed robbery, there are a lot of things parents not only can do but must do to help their sons get jobs.
You have to be kidding!
This is the first I’ve heard of this. My kids all worked prior and during college so they know how to get jobs and conduct themselves in interviews.
This has to be a joke article.
“... there are a lot of things parents not only can do but must do to help their sons get jobs.”
Short of calling in some favors, and calling their Uncle to twist arms, what do you suggest?
My sons would be absolutely mortified if we did was seemed to be suggested in the article.
Of course, my sons are quite sophisticated, too.
I don't quite agree. It is great for parents to TEACH their kids, but that must be done by teaching, not by doing it for them. "Sonny Boy, you need to send a thank you letter for the interview, and the reason is ...." or "Junior, make sure you ask about benefits, and then negotiate better benefits after settling on the base pay, that way you can push them as far as they can go on money and then push some more for that last little increment". That's a whole lot different from calling the boss yourself and negotiating for your child.
If a graduate can’t handle their own interview or negotiations, no job. One phone call from a parent is enough to kill the kids chances of a job. End of discussion.
“Thank you for calling and voicing your concerns regarding your child, but based on this phone call you have helped me reach my hiring decision. Good-Bye.”
What happened to that program in school where the kids learn how to interview and get one day a month to go to work and get class credit?
I know in the 9th grade, they would load us into a bus and take us to the mall. We would have had to select a store, call ahead and make arrange to offer them free work for the day. Most of us loved it to get out of school and be at the mall, but also it was cool to go back behind racks at the stores. Oh, and eating at the food court while those ‘suckers’ were eating school lunch was kinda cool too, LOL! I remember I went one year to a shoe store and learned how to die shoes to match prom dresses. That was to prepare us for when we got an AFTERSCHOOL job. And assume also for when we graduate whatever school we completed?
So anyway, we had mock interviews and stuff.
I’m sad to guess they don’t do that anymore? And I’m not ancient, this was just in the late 80’s.
I see helicopter parents in my workplace all the time. Most of them are in their 50s and 60s, and are getting ready to retire soon. One such coworker has a son who was driving behind a dump truck with a defective door so that the son got his windshield, headlights, and bumper all busted up by rocks. I heard his father, who works a couple of cubicles away from mine, calling up the son’s insurance company and the cops a couple of times a day for weeks arguing over it. It’s one thing to offer some fatherly advice, it’s quite another to just fight their battles for them outright. The guy’s son is 28 years old, married, and gainfully employed. That is just ridiculous.
Another hallmark of where I work: a good percentage of the 50+ workforce have a slacker 25 year old that they can’t get out of their house. What a joke that is. Daddy needs to get some stones and mommy needs to quit trying to mother them to their grave. A slacker 16 year old is tough to deal with, but if you’re having this problem with somebody over 18, the problem is you!
When it starts I intend to be on the winning side.
I disagree with the concept. Employers, and especially HR, hate interested parents, because parents can often smell a stinker deal from a mile away. Newly graduated students are naive, and can be taken as suckers by the unscrupulous, and are.
“I’m not sure we can hire another full-time employee right now, unless you were willing to work full-time for say, half-pay, for the first six months. Even though you’re qualified, there’s a lot of qualified people out there. So what do you say to being an unpaid ‘intern’ for a while?”
“We have a probationary period in which new hires work as contract employees. This saves everyone all the paperwork for things like health care and the other benefits of hires until we’re both sure you are becoming part of our ‘family’.”
“With the downturn in the economy, we are looking for personnel more interested in the many intangibles of working here than in just focusing on base salary.”
In other words, a lot of HR people are utter scum, too unethical to make it as used car salesmen for a fly by night dealer selling Katrina cars.
The best advantage of parents, however, is in bypassing HR entirely. They have a friend who knows somebody. And that person knows that a good job is opening, owes a favor, and will give the graduate the benefit of the doubt.
This means the graduate gets further and faster than they would if they did the resume dance, maybe shaving years off the time it would take them to advance at their new job. They have higher pay, and can pay off their student loans faster, which means they can get married and have kids sooner.
“Thanks, folks! It sure is better to be a VP than work my way up from the mail room. That other guy who got the mail room job is still there.”
I completely agree. As a supervisor, the last thing I need is a bitchy phone call from mommy and daddy because their little snowflake got a job reprimand. I’d head off that problem by not even hiring them.
If you are speaking of your own personal experience, good luck to your kids. It is tough times.
This kind of garbage happens a lot, sorry to say. I don’t get it either. I worked a summer job at 13 (probably illegal now). When I graduated college, my dad bought me some nice clothes as a graduation gift but he wasn’t going to bat for me in the interview process. That is just nuts!
I’d say anyone above age 15 or 16 who needs “help” getting a job from parents isn’t fit to have a job. (I mean beyond getting a contact name or something.)
I’m surprised at how many college-aged kids I hear about who have never had a job yet, or have their first job during college. I guess times have changed.
“, my dad bought me some nice clothes as a graduation gift...”
Yup. Wear the dark blue suit with the white shirt and subdued tie, black shined shoes. Be early.
That was it.
Today's graduate faces a third-world choice of part time truck driving or long term unemployment.
For some strange reason I am able to see the difference in the two situations but we have people here ~ probably "Obama Truth Squad" types ~ who do not understand the incredible danger a high "young male only" unemployment rate poses to the security of the nation.
Obama's commie pals are pretty much like their counterparts in Weimar ~ then, one day, the other guys organized the youth into the SA, etc., and that was the end of Germany.
Time to get cracking on getting these guys JOBS!
You don't help your kids by doing things for them. You help them by telling them how to do everything in the process, conducting mock interviews as needed, helping them choose the right interview clothes, proofreading the resume and suggesting that things be changed with an explanation of why but letting them choose the new words, and repeating each of those steps until the kids are ready. When I was hiring (NOT until the thug in our White House has been replaced!), if Mommy or Daddy called for their little darling, I would have shredded the resume and never called back - that would have killed the deal.
As for the sort of kids who need Mommy to hold their hands for an interview "self-organizing into armed militias", I doubt it. Those capable of organizing a relevant militia are also capable of organizing their own job searches.
Yeah, spend the first 18 years teaching them how to be self sufficient them back off and let them figure the rest on their own.
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