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.
Do you Obama Truth Squad people live in a world so isolated from events that you are ready to just dump an entire generation of tens of millions of young men until they come up with their own solutions?
I had a retail business in the 80's. I wouldn't hire someone who's parent came in asking. If the kid didn't have the drive or guts to ask for themself, too friggin' bad.
Unfortunately, it’s true. I’ve had parents call and ask to participate in job interviews. The first time I heard it I thought someone was playing a joke on me. This is a characteristic of both helicopter parents and the Gen Y student/applicant.
When you get up to 20 million unemployed young men, you are not talking about a handful of dregs who haven't already practice interviews, etc.
They have.
We are talking about our future generation of leaders and men of action who are being left hanging.
I love my parents, but they have no business sense and have given me some of the worst business advice I’ve ever received. But, to my knowledge, they have never called an employer or potential employer about my career.
This has to be a joke article.
***It’s a different generation going through the process now. My brother was the soccer coach at a state college and he got out partly because there were too many parents hovering over their kids’ soccer prospects & performance. That’s in COLLEGE.
:-) Were they all involved with the legal profession?
How about they join the military?
We didn't have that many under arms during WWII.
It's much more likely they'll form their own "military".
I'm just old enough to have benefited (initially) from the birth derth of the Great Depression.
My daughter is way smarter than me, so she doesn’t need my “help” at all. I am serious, she will do just fine without dads help and I am ok with that.
I’m failing to see how Mommy calling up and negotiating vacation time, arguing that Jr needs insurance immediately, not after 6 months or that OT isn’t fair because he has X to do 3 nights a week, is helping young adults. Part of growing up is learning how to deal with unfair employers, yucky jobs and sneaky contracts. I was stuck at a lousy job for 2 years, frantically looking the whole time for another, but I stayed, I did what I had to do, I took the boss’s needling and put up with it because I needed the job. Part of life.
My youngest son just got his first job. He’s busing table, cleaning up, washing dishes, deliveries. The pay sucks, they’re not very nice and the hours are way too long (IMO) for someone still in HS. I’m not going to call and demand better treatment or shorter hours. I would LOVE to make it easier for him. But I can’t because he won’t learn how to do it himself. He was really sick last week and wanted me to call him out, I gently made him do it himself. I’d also love to say something to the PITA who is making my older son miserable at his job. But I can’t. I won’t.
Time to pull your head up out of the sand and notice that we are nearing 20 million unemployed young men in this country.
There aren't enough tables to hop.
They’re talking about parents who call up and ask for favors for their kids or negotiate benefits. These are adults, 22+. How is that a good thing for an adult? Shouldn’t they learn that you don’t get favors right away before you’ve proven yourself at work? That Mom and Dad can’t make it all better for you every time? These aren’t kids.
I helped my sons in every way. Talked to them about what they should wear, how to do a really *good* handshake, looking in the eye, what to say, what *not* to say, what to ask or not ask. That’s where the parenting should end. Mom should not be asking why my son has to work every weekend. PuhLEASE!
I hired people for 10 of my 17 years at a hospital. I would never have hired someone who brought a parent or had their parents call to ask questions they should have been asking - or to negotiate their hours or days. And obviously other companies feel the same way. So they are NOT helping their kids get jobs by calling to ask why they have to work in a cubicle instead of getting an office, just because they have a degree. They’re actually killing their chances of kids obtaining employment.
I think if necessary I would go much further than in a normal period ~ in Pakistan sometimes they simply kidnap a member of a family that owns a business and hold them for job ransom ~ hire so many people and the kid goes free.
In Indonesia it is common for the local mullah to come to a wealthy person and dictate to them how many house servants they will support, and who.
Very much more third-world unemployment rates and that's how it will be done.
The police will beat you up for refusing to participate.
And actually, when I did hire, I preferred to hire 5o-somethings. Because every d*mn time I hired a 20 something, it wasn’t 2 months before they were complaining about having to work every weekend or at nights (made very clear to them several times during interview process that we were a 24/7 dept and that as new hire, they would be required to work these). Or they were calling out on Sat. am because they’d partied the night before. They came in late, wanted to leave early, didn’t want to work extra when we had an emergency.
In contrast the older women I hired were ready to work at the beginning of shift, pitched in whenever needed, worked nights, weekends, holidays without complaint. They were positively awesome. If I’d had a mom calling asking why Jane had to work Christmas Day, I’d have been screamingly annoyed.
Why are the HR people even talking to the parent in the first place?
Actually, there haven’t been ‘plenty of jobs’ in my area over the past 20 years. When I left the hospital for various reasons, after 20 years of continuous employment, 17 of those at the same place, it took me almost a year to land another job that wasn’t anywhere close to value or pay in what I’d been doing before. One of the other things I learned when I was in my 30s, you’re not as in demand as you thought you’d be!
Many did pretty good when it came to paying their bills first but some ran out of money fast. lol I rememer one had to sell his car because he couldn't pay his rent or daycare bill.
I wasn't aware that October/November were known to be heavy college graduation months.
I'm retired, now, but when I was working, I hired a number of college grads. I absolutely assure you that a call from a helicopter parent would guarantee rejection of the kid.
I wish I could tell you it was, but it’s not. Two years ago I interviewed a new college grad for an open IT support position on our team. Kid had minimal skills and I got the impression that he expected the job, just because he showed up.
When he got the letter telling him he did get the position, his mother actually called me demanding why her baby didn’t get the job. She got even more irate when I told her that she would have to call HR because I was not able to talk about internal decisions with her.
Helicopter Parents: Are You Hovering Over the Workplace?
Fast Company ^ | Tue May 27, 2008 at 7:16 AM | BEA FIELDS
I don’t even know where my daughter is. It’s top secret.
People have to be told this? Wow I’m amazed. If I were an HR person and someone’s parents did this I’d be keeping a list with names,addresses, and other pertinent info on it so that that person would never be hired at the place!
If the parent of an existing employee ever called me concerning his or her son or daughter's job performance, I'd give them a warning but if it ever happened again, I'd fire them on the spot. This isn't elementary school. We have a job to do and businesses to run.
We hada class in High school called “Adult Living” where we did the same thing. Even one of the local grocery stores participated and we really shopped with our fake money, it was very eye opening when I was 15 to know really how far what sounded like a big bunch of money really went!
Bill Gates' mother set up the meeting with IBM, where his father drew up the deal that made him rich. In fact I'm not even sure where Gates got the $50,000 he needed to license QDOS from the programmers who made it.
“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?”
Yep, wholeheartedly agree. I have ran across all kinds of scummy employers, and plenty who know better. I don’t mind working on contract, but if you are going to complain about paying a premium, then the employer just doesn’t get the fact that,
1. I have zero job security.
2. You are saving on employee taxes, all the way down the chain.
I would love to work full time for a decent employer but they are hard to find. Then I see articles in the paper, where they are paying a full-time web developer 120 thousand dollars working for the city!
120k, I just about blew my stack! It’s ridiculous! Given the work environment and so many people who are out of work, why are the politicians pulling themselves up to the trough!
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