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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How to Tame Summer Job ApplicationsPart 1

The year that I became the go-to person for our summer job applicants was a turning point for me.

For the previous 14 years, I was on the easy side. I was one of many staff members who benefited from having a "will do anything for food" person on the payroll. Often, that junior staff was somehow related to one of our clients. Sons, daughters, friends, neighbors - you name it, if one of our important clients had a kid that couldn't find work anywhere else, they were guaranteed a job at our company. What that kid did all summer at our office was of no concern to me. When I needed their help, I just asked for it. What they did with the rest of their day, or their week, or their summer...who cares?

Well, that all changed after I changed departments. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was heir to the summer staff...situation.

The first summer, I had no idea what to expect. I didn't know who the summer help would be, their age, their skills, their interests. In fact, let's stop right there. I didn't know if that kid actually wanted a job and couldn't find one, or if the parent was forcing them into working through their summer vacation. Nor did I know what had been promised to this kid in order to entice them to actually show up to work. Turns out they were promised ALOT. And it was not alot of moving boxes and organizing storage closets and updating archives and running errands, which is really what they were capable of doing; as long as it was under close supervision. Actually, one of them was too young to drive so ixnay on having him run errands.

The second summer, I tried to get a little more prepared. I thought it would be a good idea to ask the bosses in the Spring if they planned on having any kids work for us that summer. That way, I told them, I could start planning ahead on what type of work to get ready for them. "Oh no," they said, "we don't even have enough work to keep our full-time staff busy. Why would you even think of hiring more people in the summer?" Well excuse me. Forgive me for trying to plan ahead.

15 years working with them and I still accepted what they said as truth. In the following weeks, as I started to receive emails from high school and college students, I responded to each in about the same way. "Sorry, we're not hiring any summer help this year. Try such and such a firm. Maybe they are hiring." I felt terrible. I wasn't convinced that we were not hiring, I only knew that the bosses didn't know if they were hiring.


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