4.2. REACHING OUT TO PARENTS
A small but growing number of companies are trying to woo parents, as well as their children, for a very simple and selfish reason: they hope that enlisting parents as their allies will help them attract and retain millennials. Companies realize that parents are often pulling the strings in their children's job search, pushing them to pursue certain careers. Consequently, to land a strong job candidate who is weighing two employment offers, companies sometimes try to assuage parents' fears and uncertainty. A senior executive at a financial services firm, for instance, decided to call a promising applicant's mother because she had told her daughter that the banking industry was unstable. He failed to change the mother's mind, however, and the daughter ended up taking a management consulting job instead.
Perhaps the most accommodating employer these days is Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Unlike many employers, it doesn't view interacting with parents in a negative light at all. Enterprise's attitude is that it's best to provide complete and accurate information about the company and job offers to parents because millennials will most likely want to consult them and capitalize on their knowledge and experience.
If job candidates ask that their parents be part of the hiring process, Enterprise readily includes them. It mails parents "welcome letters" from vice presidents, and information packets about the company, job opportunities, and employee benefits. Most striking is Enterprise's willingness to let parents listen in on the telephone when the company offers a job to their children. Parents are supposed to abide by the ground rules and not make any comments on the phone. Later, after discussing the offer and the compensation package with their children, they can call Enterprise recruiters back and pose questions.
"We welcome the fact that parents want to help their children make decisions," says Marie Artim, assistant vice president for recruiting at Enterprise. "We want to make them feel more comfortable about a company they may not know well before their child decides to join us."
Most companies don't let parents get nearly as involved as Enterprise does. Indeed, some recruiting managers laugh in disbelief when they hear that parents can become such active participants in job offers. A few employers, however, are considering following Enterprise's lead, but only to a point. They say they might be amenable to providing job descriptions and benefit information in writing to parents, but they want to limit the conversations and meetings to the job candidate.
Meanwhile, some companies have used their Web sites to communicate with parents. For instance, Office Depot Inc. included a parents section on its careers Web site with an empathic message: "You may be anticipating your child's graduation with mixed emotions: You are proud of what your child has accomplished so far, but probably melancholic about your 'baby' moving on to his or her next step and concerned about them being able to provide for themselves. . . . Many parents want to be involved and supportive of their child's career without being too involved."
Similarly, the U.S. Army recruiting Web site addresses parents' concerns about their children enlisting during wartime and touts the benefits of college financial aid and leadership training. Given the potential dangers that soldiers face, the Army understandably feels both an obligation and an urgent need to begin a dialogue with parents. "This generation listens more to their parents and seeks their affirmation," says Lt. Col. Shawn Buck, chief of the market research and analysis division of the U.S. Army Accessions Command. When he was a university professor of military science, he recalls that some parents were very vocal about their opposition to the armed forces, sometimes even offering their children gifts if they didn't enlist. "I remember one father offered his son half of his business to keep him out of the military," Buck says.
Mothers, however, are the biggest challenge. The Army's research found that only about a quarter of mothers are likely to recommend military service, compared with 33% of fathers and 41% of grandparents. Moms also are the most likely to try to talk their children out of joining the armed forces, but they also are the least knowledgeable about the military. Given that lack of information, the Army hopes to influence both mothers and fathers through its Web site.
When mothers and fathers click on the parents section of the site, they immediately get this pitch: "You made them strong. We'll make them Army strong." They can download a "discussion tool kit," in which the Army urges parents to let their children pursue their dreams: "Your son or daughter may still be your little baby, but don't treat him or her like one. It takes a lot of courage to even consider the Army. Respect that." There are also features describing daily life at an Army post, deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, and ways to keep in touch by telephone, mail, the Internet, and personal visits.
Probably the most influential parts of the Web site are the testimonials from families discussing the hard decision of letting children become soldiers. In one video, Molly Anderson talks about her daughter Sgt. Autumn Anderson and how Autumn's announcement about joining the Army Reserve shocked her. As a single mother, Molly says, she had a "protective mother bear instinct," but "eventually, I did see it Autumn's way. I had no choice but to allow her to create her own world."
Millennial parents arouse sympathy in some employers. They understand that most parents don't mean any harm and are just looking out for their children's happiness and security. Matthew Schuyler, for one, strongly believes in tactful diplomacy with parents. As chief human resources officer for Capital One Financial Corp., he observes plenty of helicopter parents but isn't offended by them. Parents want to see the offices where their kids are going to work, and they pepper the human resources department with questions about job offers. Recruiters for the financial services company politely answer their questions and correspond with them, mailing out the corporate annual report and brochures. "Talking to parents is a good thing because there's something to be leveraged here," Schuyler believes. "If we call a student at home during a school break and get the parent on the line, we take full advantage of that to tell them how great their child is and how much we want him or her at Capital One. It's no different from sports teams involving parents when they recruit a player."
On campus, a few parents have tried to crash the job interview, which puts Capital One recruiters in a delicate situation. They don't want to upset the parents, so they turn on the charm in the waiting room and try to divert their attention away from the interview. "Our recruiters become sort of armchair psychiatrists" to gently rein parents in, Schuyler says. "In some ways, these parents are living vicariously, and in some ways, they want to prevent their children from making the same mistakes they did when they started their careers."
Like Capital One, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. sees parents as partners in helping recruit their children. For example, it invites parents of some of its top-performing interns to attend its annual meeting in Milwaukee. Former intern Mark Kull took his parents to the meeting and believes that the experience really sold them on Northwestern Mutual and his plans to pursue a career as a financial representative. "They sat there with Northwestern's financial advisers listening to the speeches and realized this is a real career, not just peddling insurance products," Kull says. "I already felt passionately about Northwestern, but it never hurts to have the family's support."
Now as a Northwestern Mutual financial representative in Louisville, Kentucky, Kull reaches out to the parents of his office's interns. "We invite their parents to spend an evening at the office," he says, "and when an intern does something good, I'll send a handwritten note to parents. I tell them we're proud of their child and give them my cell phone number to call if they have any questions."
Official parent days like the one at Ogilvy are likely to become more commonplace. They may prove especially beneficial for parents of younger college students taking summer internships with companies. A notable example is Merrill Lynch & Co., which invited parents of some of its summer interns to its New York City headquarters to see where their children would be working and take a look at the Wall Street area of Manhattan. Parents toured the brokerage firm's equities trading floor, learned about investment banking, heard presentations from Merrill executives and managers about career opportunities, and met some of the people their children would be working with. The goal was to ingratiate the firm with parents and overcome any reservations they might have about their children spending their summer with such a big company in such a big city.
Companies have received some criticism for encouraging helicopter parenting with such events, but Merrill defends its parent day as a well-intentioned response to millennials' desire to involve their families in their careers. "Sometimes you feel like an enabler for the parents," says a manager at Merrill, "but we decided to roll with the helicopter parent issue rather than try to fight it."
Merrill sees its parent day as giving it a strategic edge in the intense competition among banks for top college graduates. It hopes the good will it creates will help convert summer interns into full-time hires after graduation. Indeed, many parents came away with peace of mind and the sense that Merrill cares about its employees and not just the bottom line. Toni and Leonard Simon of Houston, Texas, believe that the parent day played a significant role in their daughter Tonyel's decision to accept a full-time offer from Merrill. "Because Merrill Lynch showed so much interest in her family, she knew their values were in line with hers," Toni Simon says. "Tonyel had offers from other banks, but none offered the opportunity for parents to visit." The Simons rode the city subways to get a feel for their daughter's commute to work, visited the World Trade Center site of the terrorist attacks, and dined in restaurants near Merrill's offices. "It was a very informative and reassuring experience," says Toni Simon.
Rena Arbuthnot of Shreveport, Louisiana, was also impressed when she attended Merrill's parent day with her son. She notes that she particularly liked the "Wall Street finance 101 workshop that was offered so that we wouldn't be confused by the lingo he'd be using." Before the visit, she had perceived Wall Street firms to be cutthroat and "not the best environment" for her son. "But the visit to Merrill Lynch really put my mind at ease," she says. "The people I met seemed warm and concerned about the interns." Given such reactions, Merrill deemed the parent event a resounding success and has made it an annual affair.
Goldman Sachs, a Merrill competitor, has considered a parent event in the United States, but hasn't organized anything yet. However, it does invite both parents and students interested in a career in operations to its Spend a Day@GS event in India. They have lunch, tour the office, and meet with senior leaders.
Goldman takes pains to deal with parents' hesitation about their children joining India's outsourcing industry. Parents often believe that outsourcing jobs are low-end and monotonous, with little chance for career advancement. But Goldman tells parents that GS India is not an outsourced office but rather an integral part of the company and that their children could eventually advance to associate or vice president positions. The company also tries to allay parents' worries about the safety of their children, especially women, who might end up working the night shift. It guarantees that employees on late shifts will be picked up and dropped off at their homes. Based on job acceptance rates of 75% to 80%, Goldman says it believes that the event helps cement its relationship with the students and parents.
Still, some companies question whether millennials really want them to reach out directly to parents. Harris Corp., a communications and information technology company, surveyed engineering students and discovered that they preferred that the company not include a FAQ section for parents on its careers Web site and not send letters and other information to their parents. "We know that parents are involved because we see a lot of job acceptances after a school break when the students have gone home and discussed the offers with their parents," says Cindy Kane, director of corporate relations at Harris. "But I think some students don't want us to reach out directly to parents because they want to believe they're more independent."