Gen Y – Getting phone calls from parents during the interviewing and hiring process – WHAT???

Kristin Grassaro from NAS Communication gave the following scenario:

Scenario: A HR Director told me she had a parent call and harass her about why her child did not get a specific job. The HR Director politely told the parent that she’d be more than happy to discuss with the applicant if they wanted to give her a call. The parent insisted on knowing why and that they would pass the information on to their child. How would you handle it from here?

How would I respond? No hire, No way – Frankly, I’m ashamed -

There can’t be any playing into it – what happens when the person has a bad day at work? What about when they don’t do their job well and think they are going to get fired? What about if a boss yells at them for something? Is there parent going to call? Is there going to be a parent-boss-child conference?

I’m not far removed from this age group (I was pretty fortunate to graduate when I was 20) and I wouldn’t ever expect anyone to do this. I would never hire and will never hire someone who’s parents call me to check in because obviously that is someone who must be questioned as to their effectiveness and I firmly believe that. I believe it shows zero accountability, zero independence, zero initiative and a lack of maturity.

Let me give you an example – I am a Boy Scout leader and a number of Scouts each year decide to do Eagle Projects to achieve the highest rank. We have a firm policy that the Scout needs to be the one who takes a initiative and is the one who makes the phone calls they need to make, do what they need to do and take the leadership position in getting their project signed off and completed. If a parent calls for anything (we don’t care that the Scouts are 13-16), no deal and we don’t do anything for them. People know this now and part of preparation and growing up is doing things for yourself and we hope our Scouts are learning something in that regard.

In other countries a job choice is a family decision – China, India – you spend as much time conveying information (hopefully just through the candidate) to the family about why they should work with your firm but in the U.S. it’s not a family choice or decision it’s babysitting, spoiling and what you call “special” I call ridiculous (and a few other words). I guess the safe thing to do is say “this is confidential information between us and (name) so have them call me” but I think the best thing to do is not hire the person period.

I seem to be getting flack for this – what do you think? What would you do? Am I way off base here?

Fortune had a very interesting article today in regards to the P in the A’s my generation is. (Thanks Todd Raphael)

–Mark Newman