Millennials Are Seriously Bringing Their Parents With Them To Job Interviews
The ultra helicopter — but more like straight up HOVERCRAFT– parents have landed and they have officially taken their micromanaging parenting style to new airliner heights. Accompanying your kid to school everyday and taking their exams for them is officially no longer the bar in batshit parenting. Joining them on their job interview is.
The Wall Street Journal reports that those blasted millennials (I’m one of y’all) is at it again with their lack of umbilical cord snipping. As my fellow generation and I join and persist in the workforce, employers are finding themselves “embracing parental involvement and using it to attract and hold onto talent and boost employee morale.” Why? Because it makes their younger employees happier, and therefore more productive:
…Michael Van Grinsven, field-growth and development director at the Milwaukee-based financial firm [ Northwestern Mutual], says the company does everything it can to accommodate the parents of college-aged interns, including regularly inviting them to the office for open houses.
“It’s become best practice,” Mr. Van Grinsven says, noting that parents can influence their children’s career decisions. Some Northwestern Mutual managers call or send notes to parents when interns achieve their sales goals and let parents come along to interviews and hear details of job offers. They may even visit parents at home.
Mr. Van Grinsven says the efforts have paid off: The number of interns meeting the company’s benchmark for success in sales has risen more than 40% since 2007, a productivity improvement that he attributes in part to more parental support.
Other companies, like a little one you may have heard of named Google, has reportedly seen a boost in “participation numbers” following a second annual “Take Your Parents to Work Day” in which the company hosted over 2,000 parents. Sounds like Back To School night all over again.
Yet, despite our knee jerk reaction to rage against the American helicopter parenting club, some data actually reveals that we are not as hyper-managey with our children as other nations. A 2013 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP., a global accountancy firm, suggests that our “parental involvement” is not quite up there with the rest of the world. YET:
The study, which surveyed 44,000 people from more than 20 countries, found that just 6% of recent college graduates surveyed in the U.S. wanted their parents to receive a copy of their offer letters. That’s well below the global average of 13% and much less than some other countries, where it was as high as 30%. The study also found that just 2% of young employees in the U.S. want their parents to receive a copy of their performance review, compared with the global average of 8%.
Don’t tell the tiger moms and dads out there that we could actually be doing better on this.
