Praise Jah or the universe -- my three teenagers have jobs this summer! The oldest of them (by five hours), our daughter, is working at Plato's Closet, a teen-focused resale shop. Her twin brother is at the Dollar Tree. Their younger brother is over at Savers, another resale shop. If you want to buy ultra-cheap clothing and household items in Boulder, my kids have you covered.
Our teenagers' smaller siblings are impressed, because the big kids can buy them pizza and other treats now (and surprisingly, they occasionally do).
Here's how the three kids got hired, and how your kid can get a summer job this year (or a job during the school year, for that matter). It's very easy to teach kids to follow this job search approach and it works ridiculously well. We call this teenage job search method "Tell Me My Movie" -- you'll see why we call it that in a second.
There are two parts to the Tell Me My Movie job search approach. The first one is to give context to your past jobs when you fill out a job application.
Here's how kids are taught (if they're taught at all) to fill out a standard job application, whether online or on paper:
PAST EMPLOYER: Target
TITLE: Cashier/stock
DUTIES: Put away product, ran cash register, made change
REASON FOR LEAVING: More hours
We can get a ton more than these bare facts into the job application form. We can give the hiring manager a much stronger sense of who you are by adding some altitude to your description of your past job:
PAST EMPLOYER: Target (Boulder store)
TITLE: Cashier/stock
DUTIES: I was hired to do stock and was trained on cashiering within six weeks. I bounced between running a register and helping guests on the floor, resolving customer service issues and helping out in Guest Services. High-pressure, fast-paced job where I learned a ton about merchandising and inventory.
REASON FOR LEAVING: Hoping to work at Dollar Tree, closer to home
When you give context to your past job roster and not just the name/date details, you do three ridiculously important things:
1) Your thoughtful take on the most recent or current role tells the hiring manager, "I know what was important in that last job. My eyes were open [and indeed, still are]. I know what the job was about."
2) Your description tells your next manager "I do what's needed; I don't just perform tasks because someone tells me to."
3) Your mini job summary tells the reader in a soft and non-braggy way, "I have a brain, I can write, and I can deal with people. You'd do well to meet me in person."
Hurrah!
Let's say you don't have a "real" W-2 job to report on your job application. That's no problem. One of my kids listed three past jobs on his application, although up until that time he'd never had a W-2 type gig.
One of the past jobs was my company (where he did online research). The second was his own freelance lawn-care business with a half-dozen regular clients. The third was his three-month assignment as a teacher-in-training for a middle school band program he held during his junior year of high school.
Employers don't care how a kid got paid. They want to know that a kid understands what work is and how to show up to work on time and get things done. That is the key. It isn't easy for a hiring manager to gather this information in a job interview. Kids tend to give clipped answers, as the manager sits there looking a kid and wondering, "Does this kid have anything going on in that brain of his?"
The more of a kid's heft and moxie we can slip into the job application and drip into the manager's brain during the interview, the better.
That means listing babysitting on your application if that's all you've got (I'm not dissing babysitting! Babysitters and other neighborhood job-savvy kids make the best employees at every stage of a career, if you ask me) and listing other worthwhile projects you showed up and contributed to, whether you got paid for them or not.
I said before that there are two parts to the Tell Me My Movie job-search approach. The second piece happens at the job interview.
Once your contextual job application gets you scheduled for a live job interview, here's what you'll do.
Early on in the interview or even the minute your tush hits the seat, the manager is likely to ask an open-ended question. The question might be "Tell me about yourself," (not a question, I know) or something equally vague. You're not going to launch into a description of yourself or start recounting your life story. The truth is, the manager couldn't care less about that. He or she is just looking for ways to get a glimpse of your brain working.
Here's how you'll spin the conversation to talk about something more interesting (from a harried manager's POV) than your life story -- namely, to start talking about the job itself, and your understanding of it.
MANAGER: So, Tracee, tell me about yourself.
TRACEE: Oh, I'm in a dance troupe and I grew up in New Jersey. I've worked before, not in a retail store but at a restaurant. You know Jack, I don't want to keep you here all day hearing my life story -- can I ask you a quick question about the job, to make sure I'm talking about things that are relevant to you?
MANAGER: For sure, shoot.
TRACEE: Well, I've only been to Target as a shopper until now of course, but I must have been in this store a million times. I can see that the team members here seem to have three huge priorities: They have to keep the shelves stocked, they have to keep the shoppers moving through the checkout lines quickly without feeling rushed and they have to make sure that nobody leaves the store without finding something he or she was looking for. That must be huge, because everytime I'm here someone asks me, "Are you finding everything okay?" So I guess the last item is learning the store layout and where the products are, aisle by aisle.
Apart from those three things, is there anything big that I'm missing?
MANAGER: Well, we call the shoppers Guests, but no, you aren't missing anything. If you were applying for a cart attendant job, we'd be talking about gathering carts and palletizing returns and cleaning bathrooms, but for a Sales or Stock job you've really wrapped it up. Tell me, what's your schedule for the rest of the summer?
The manager is already talking about schedules. Tracee just neatly sliced through the time-consuming interview that the manager planned to conduct today (and dreaded, let's be honest) by telling the guy "I know your movie." She told him what the job entails. What information did Tracee's "question" convey?:
1) She let him know that her eyes are open -- she's paying attention to what's going on around her.
2) She made it clear that she's thought through and understands exactly what the job entails.
3) She's gone further and explained WHY Target associates do some of the things they do -- like asking guests whether they're finding everything they need, for instance -- making it clear that Tracee has some altitude on the role and work in general.
Compare Tracee's "Here's what I think your movie looks like" wrap-up to the typical job interview for a teenager-friendly job:
MANAGER: So, Ellen, tell me about yourself.
ELLEN: Well, I'm in French club and I'm going to be a senior in high school. Um, what else do you want to know?
MANAGER: Do you know what we do here at Target?
ELLEN: You sell a ton of stuff, for sure.
MANAGER: Why do you want the job?
ELLEN: I want an Xbox and my mom said I have to get my own money to pay for it.
When kids do both parts of the Tell Me My Movie job-search approach -- when they add context to a written job application and spin the table to describe the manager's movie in a job interview -- they tend to get hired. I am always excited to hear their stories, of course. The traditional job application and job interview frames don't encourage kids to show their brains working, but of course it's in their best interests (and their prospective employers' interests) to do that.
If your kid tries the Tell Me My Movie approach, I'd love to hear about it in the comment section below.