How to Tame Summer Job ApplicationsPart 2

In Austin, the school year finishes up in early May. Students who want work for the summer don't wait until the summer to apply. They start sending emails and making phone calls in March and April. So, in March I asked my bosses if they were sure they didn't want to hire anyone for the summer because my email saying we're not hiring for the summer means that we don't have any work, and if our wonderful first rate company can't even have students for the summer, we must be in a down-turn and if that's true, we're closing up shop. Yep, by the end of the year it'll be all over.

• In March, my bosses acted like I was nuts for even asking the question.


• In April, my bosses said summer was too far off for them to think about it.


• In early May, my bosses asked me if we had any summer help coming because we sure could use it.

The day before my Memorial Day weekend was to begin, my bosses informed me that three students will be working for us this summer and they will start after the holiday weekend and that I need to come up with some work to keep them busy, but they are clients kids so we can't just let them do grunt work and whatever you do, don't let anyone in the office say negative things about that client while that kid is around.

Oh yeah. This is going to be a great holiday weekend for me.

And what a fun summer I had! One kid wanted to redesign our company's website. I agreed that it needed to be redesigned, but I doubted very seriously that the bosses would turn that over to a high school kid just because he knows Dreamweaver. Sure enough, he got his hopes up, came up with something relatively good, and was completely shot down. He left us that summer feeling defeated and confused. Join the club, kid!

At the end of that summer - the second one where I had to figure out what to do with a bunch of disinterested kids - I decided to take things into my own hands. It was risky, I know, because I would be doing something without permission from the bosses. In that work environment, if they knew I was planning so far in advance not only would they have ridiculed me, they would have blackballed me from any further conversations about staffing. The reality was that I was the one receiving emails from students asking about summer work. And I was the one who didn't want people to think that we were closing shop because we don't have any work to do. And I was the one who would have to deal with the summer help, no matter when they were hired or what they were promised.

So I came up with a plan. It's really simple when you think about it.


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