parents going on job interviews

Two little cowboys.

My kids are on their way to adulting. One will be celebrating a full-year on the job in a month, post-college degree. My daughter is going to career fairs and has interviewed for two jobs so far, landing one job offer. I will repeat and say loudly that I had nothing to do with it. Well, maybe one thing—I helped them by purchasing clothes for their interviews. But that was it. Apparently, other parents of millennials are getting much more involved. I wrote about crazy helicopter parents interfering in their children’s job searches a few months ago here.

I discovered another article that gives more examples of parents going over the line in the name of “helping” their children. The article is called “Parents of millennials are too involved in their kids’ careers” by Corinne Purtill on Quartz. She talks about a mom “mean tweeting” a company that didn’t offer her son a job and includes scary statistics from a 2016 survey of how many helicopter parents are getting involved in their adult children’s careers. You can read an excerpt here:

“Parents: butt out of your adult children’s job searches.

“This may seem obvious. But it’s not, in the context of the wildly inappropriate parental intrusions that hiring managers see with astounding regularity. Parents are calling to arrange interviews for perfectly functional adult children, inserting themselves into schedule or salary negotiations, and haranguing a manager by phone or email for failing to hire or promote their precious offspring.

“In a misguided effort to help their children gain short-term achievement, hiring managers say, many parents unwittingly cripple their adult sons’ and daughters’ ability to succeed on their own. What’s more, these unhealthy entanglements in their adult child’s professional life are preventing parents from being supportive in ways that actually do help their child—who is, in fact, an adult.

“Much too much
“In a 2016 survey of helicopter parenting in the workplace from the staffing firm OfficeTeam, senior managers reported parental intrusions of astonishing cheek: asking to sit in on job interviews, bringing cakes to potential employers, calling the hiring manager in the guise of an employment reference to heap praise on their son.

“After media reports of meddling parents in the workplace started surfacing after the recession of the early 2000s, Michigan State University researcher Phil Gardner surveyed 725 employers about whether they’d seen such behavior. A full 31% of respondents had a parent apply for a job on behalf of their adult child, according to a 2007 report. Another 15% of the employers fielded complaints from parents about passed-over children, 9% had a parent try to negotiate the new hire’s salary or benefits, and 4% actually attended job interviews alongside their adult children. The financial crisis of 2008 and the rise of texting, which enabled constant communication between parents and grown kids, has only intensified the trend.

“On this point hiring managers are explicitly clear: absolutely nothing good comes of a parent getting involved in a child’s job search.
“No employer is going to think this is okay,” said Alison Green, a consultant who writes the popular blog Ask a Manager. “Managers really need to refuse to engage if a parent contacts them, assuming it’s not to relay some sort of serious emergency with their kid.”

“Casey Newton, an editor at the Verge, received a baffling direct message on Twitter in 2016. The tone of the message was accusatory. It was “something along the lines of, ‘You have a lot of nerve getting someone’s hopes up like that,’” Newton recalled. He’d never met the woman, but her last name looked familiar. A quick check of her social media profiles confirmed she was the mother of a job candidate Newton had recently passed over.”

It is stunning to me that 31% of parents interviewed in the study quoted in the article, applied to jobs on behalf of their adult children. I bet they are the same parents who did their children’s homework to ensure good grades. Then, they filled out college applications and wrote the college entrance essays, too.