In the great blogging tradition, I’m going to use my little corner of the blogosphere to rant for a topic near and dear to me. If you’re in retail, you’re going to be more than familiar with this rant. In fact, if you own any kind of business at all that hires young people, everything I’m going to say will resonate with you!
Let me start this out by saying that over the past 33 years, I’ve hired more people than you could ever imagine. Hundreds and hundreds of people – many of whom are on the younger side.
Lately, I’ve discovered that I’m not just hiring the young people. I’ve got their parents on board, too!
99% of the young people we hire are GREAT! They work hard and they do a good job. But there’s always teh employee who just isn’t right for our store, for whatever reason. They might not understand the importance of customer service. They might be incapable of running the cash register properly, no matter how many times we train them. They might, frankly, rather be anywhere else but working — and it shows.
Then we have to let those people go.
That’s when the phone calls start. Angry parents who cannot believe we’ve fired their child. They call, confident in their knowledge that their child is an absolute perfect angel and that we’re the biggest jerks on the planet for firing their kid.
What are you supposed to say at that point? I can tell you this: if I’d gone home as a young man and told my father I’d gotten myself fired, he would have been angry too — at me! Clearly, if I got fired, I did something to deserve it. No one fires employees for the fun of it!
I’m a parent too. I know how much we love our kids. I also know that sometimes the best thing we can do as parents is to step back and let our kids stand on our own two feet. We don’t help them by interfering in their jobs! Somehow that message has gotten lost along the way.
We get a lot of parents who tell us, “My kid needs a job.” Now we say, “We don’t hire parents. If your kid is looking for a job, have them come in and pick up an application!”
