Make Room in Your Office for the Helicopter Parent

“Helicopter parents” are increasingly landing in their kids’ job scene.

Long known for over-involved hovering around schools and sports events, helicopter parents’ flight paths now sometimes include stops in the workplace.

These are the findings of a fascinating survey by Office Team that recently examined the phenomenon of such parental involvement, and how management is responding to it.

For the survey, managers were asked to recall some of the more “unusual or surprising behavior” of helicopter parents. Some of the responses are below.

“One parent asked if she could do the interview for her child because he had somewhere else to be.”

“A job seeker was texting his parents the questions I was asking during the interview and waiting for a response.”

“A father asked us to pay his son a higher salary.”

“A woman brought a cake to try to convince us to hire her daughter.”

“One mom knocked on the office door during an interview and asked if she could sit in.”

“The candidate opened his laptop and had his mother Skype in for the interview.”

While the precise level of incidence is hard to determine, Brandi Britton, district president for Office Team, confirms parental involvement is a reasonably common phenomenon. “As a staffing firm, it’s not uncommon for us to encounter helicopter parents in the job search,” Britton says, ”And we’ve even heard of moms and dads hovering in career stages beyond that. This time of year, especially, we tend to hear more about helicopter parents since many students recently graduated and are hoping to land their first positions – potentially with a little help from mom and dad since finding a job is totally new to them.”

Managers' reactions – So how do managers react to parents being actively involved in their kids’ job search?

According to the survey, 35% felt “It’s annoying – job seekers should handle things on their own.”

34% felt “I wouldn’t recommend it, but I’ll let it slide.”

29% felt “It’s totally fine for job seekers to get help from their parents.”

Let me here interject a longtime manager’s (and parent’s) perspective. Personally, I think the managers interviewed for this survey have been extraordinarily tolerant and patient. And I do get that parents want the best for their kids. Sure. Understood. We all do. As a former manager for the largest employer in my area I was occasionally asked by a parent to guide a son or daughter’s resume to the right hiring manager or HR executive – and if I knew the young man or woman and thought highly of them, which I usually did, I was glad to voluntarily put in a good word for them. That level of parental involvement is entirely reasonable networking – it’s just how business is done. I never at all minded, never even thought twice about it.

But that kind of parental involvement is entirely different from the Skyping and cake-carrying and interview-meddling described above.

I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon, but this is my candid reaction to such “high-touch” parental involvement. If mom or dad had asked me to “Skype in” to an interview with their son or daughter, after I recovered from my initial astonishment I would have had five words for it.

1.Outlandish

2. Inappropriate

3. Not a chance

There’s a great old saying that parents should give their children “roots and wings.” Roots for a solid foundation and wings to make their own way.

That doesn’t include the wings of a helicopter!

Perhaps most important, for job searchers and parents this level of over-involvement just isn’t helpful. It’s counterproductive.

Ms. Britton offers the best perspective. “Ultimately,” she says simply, “Companies seek employees who display self-sufficiency and maturity.”

Original article found here