Skip to main content

Juvenile Times

It is common for people in their middle-age or older to bemoan the falling standards of things and recall how things were better in their youth. We have all seen our grandparents and parents go through this phase and then it becomes our turn to repeat the pattern - I am guilty myself. But reading about Gen Z bringing their parents to their job interviews feels like something that would have been incomprehensible in my day and it legitimately sounds like things have taken a turn for the worse. 

In my day, no employer would take such a person seriously, there was no way such interview would translate into a job offer. What is interesting about the story is how HR is responding to this next level compulsive hovering of parents. They want to be accommodative and find way to explain and excuse the behavior and give this person a fair-shake. Sounds to me like a great disservice is being done to members of Gen Z who are perfectly capable of writing their own resume, conducting their own job-search and do not require a parent to accompany them to a job interview. It seems like attaining adulthood in the real sense should be respected and celebrated not treated as optional, nice to have. The way all this is explained away is fascinating: 

“We have a generation getting into the workforce now that likes connection,” she said. “They want people to get excited about their decisions so their process is about bringing people along with them. That’s their comfort level and as long as that’s still there, we’re going to see that kind of supported decision making in the years ahead.”

Why can't the person keep the parent in the loop, seek their opinion and counsel offline? That would keep everyone in the informed and cognizant of the decision-making process. Maybe this craziness needs to be taken a step further to its logical conclusion. Instead of being a passive participant, the parent should co-interview with the kid and get co-hired so the employer gets additional value and the kid can feel fully supported at all times in the workplace and the parent will never need to miss a beat.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more