The people you employ are your company’s most valuable resource. Finding the right fit is important! Employees come from all walks of life, but when the applicant you’re interested in is also a parent, it’s important to keep everyone’s best interests in mind. Top Applicant is devoted to making modern hiring easy. Let’s break down the basics of hiring parents together.
First Things First
To keep your legal team happy as well, make sure you fully understand the laws enforced by the EEOC surrounding this topic. There are multiple federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on race, color, sex (including sexual orientation, gender identity, and pregnancy), religion, national origin, age (40 or older), disability, and genetic information, as well as reprisal for protected activity.
When considering hiring a parent, Executive Order (E.O.) 13152 prohibits federal-sector discrimination based on status as a parent. Under this order, you are not legally allowed to directly ask any applicant if they are a parent or base any of your hiring decisions on that factor.
Now that we have the important legal aspects covered, let’s discuss what to consider if an applicant lets you know they’re a parent.
Understanding Priorities
Finding the right person for your position is always a priority. But what are the applicants’ priorities? Make sure your job description and interview questions are clear and concise when you discuss the duties and responsibilities of your position. Keep in mind that you’re most likely not the only company that the applicant is applying to. Being clear about expectations, compensation, and flexibility is key to attracting applicants and hiring a parent.
It’s also important to understand the unique priorities of the person you’re looking to hire. Every parent is different, so take the time to craft your interview questions and get to know the person behind the application. For example, a parent with older children may have more flexibility than a new parent would. Typical priorities for modern working parents include employer expectations, flexibility, and of course, benefits and compensation.
Setting Boundaries
Whether it’s turning off your work phone or maintaining a regular schedule, boundaries come in all forms. When hiring parents, it’s crucial to build and maintain healthy work-life integration. There are great ways to promote holistic boundaries on both ends during the hiring process as well.
Retain common courtesy when contacting applicants.
For example, if an applicant puts in their profile that they coach little league, you may want to wait until regular working hours to ask for follow-up details.
Our best advice is to request multiple interview times, be open to a late call, and stop sending emails around dinner time. All of our suggestions don’t just maintain courtesy, it also makes conversations easy to document and track. Using our analytics tool, you can find the best time to reach applicants and improve future hiring strategies.
Have a current employee describe their experience.
By doing this, the applicant can build their expectations and can gauge how they would fit into your culture. Group interviews also help the applicant envision themselves at your company, increasing their chances of accepting your offer.
At Top Applicant, the people building our solutions every day are the best people to describe what we do. That’s why we give businesses every chance to share the employee experience. With video integration, detailed profiles and other tools to help increase connectivity, our platform is centered around making communication easy for everyone throughout the hiring process.
Be firm, yet flexible.
As you select your ideal applicant, compromise isn’t a bad thing. For example, if an applicant checks most of your boxes, but needs a few extra flexible hours, providing reasonable accommodations can mean the difference between filling your position and sifting through more applications. You may even get more than you bargained for!
On the other hand, if you have any concerns about a potential employee, or what a particular hire might mean to your team, it’s time to collaborate. We recommend recording all of your interviews. With other hiring managers’ input, you can base your hiring decisions on more than just one opinion. If you don’t have this luxury, trust your gut. Read over other applicant profiles, bookmark, others and even invite more, you’ll find the right fit soon by using your tools.
Common Qualities
While hiring parents may require additional flexibility, compensation, or considerations, they often have qualities that help their home run smoothly, which in turn can benefit your company. Saying that your team is like a family makes many modern applicants cringe; however, there are some qualities that make effective employees and parents.
Dedication
Simply put, if someone can survive nightly feedings or temper tantrums, chances are they’ll handle tough projects and get the job done. Hiring parents may require a few minutes for them to pick up their kids from school. But think of it this way: If they can show up to the pick-up line on time, it’s a safe bet they’ll show up to work with the same punctuality.
Organization
Does your office have a chore chart? Maybe not, but the parent you’re interviewing might have one hanging on the fridge! Prioritizing tasks, schedules, and meetings may be difficult for some employees, but for parents, it’s just another day in paradise. Play dates, chore wheels, and bedtimes aren’t so different from team meetings, daily tasks, and due dates when you consider all the work a parent does off the clock as well.
Responsibility
Above all, the true measure of a parent is how much they’re trusted by their children. A happy, healthy household is built on trust, and so is a happy, healthy company. When hiring parents, consider how they handle the responsibility on and off the clock. If an applicant displays the ability to reliably juggle personal and professional responsibilities, you’ll have one less thing to worry about when hiring them.
Overcoming Reservations
We’re not saying that every parent is a perfect employee. It’s okay for you and your company to have reservations throughout the hiring process. But, it’s also important not to let those reservations affect your hiring decisions completely. Here’s how we recommend reframing pretenses that may be holding your hiring process back.
Time Management
If an employee has trouble putting time to their tasks, it can slow down your entire workflow. Missing deadlines isn’t good for anyone, but if an employee can’t meet deadlines due to their workload at home, it puts managers in an especially difficult position. This is why time management is a common concern when hiring parents.
This is where flexibility is important. Firing an employee is an HR nightmare if the reason can be tied to their duties as a parent. To assuage tense relations and keep projects on track, consider presenting options that spread out the employees’ workload, or delegate tasks to other members of their team. Efficient and reasonable time management can mean the difference between growing your business and regularly filling the same positions.
Compensation
We don’t have to tell you how competitive modern hiring is. Companies need to be competitive to retain and hire the best employees now more than ever. The exact cause of this can be traced back to many factors, but there’s one factor that remains constant. It currently costs over $310,000 to raise a child in the United States. So, if you’re considering hiring a parent, be prepared to talk about compensation.
One school of thought is offering competitive wages and bonuses. However, this typically means that your company has less wiggle room for other aspects like PTO and health benefits. This is why negotiation is on the rise in modern hiring processes. A parent may be willing to take a lower wage for more flexible PTO and better benefits. The opposite may be true as well, so our advice is to be open to negotiations—but never give more than you’re willing to.
Focus
For every employee, maintaining focus is essential. As you consider the best candidates for your position, gauging their potential to maintain this focus can be difficult. After all, you only have a few minutes to learn about years of experience. That’s why we recommend getting to know your potential employee on a personal level as well.
Top Applicant makes it easy to get to know the person behind the profile with a few simple tools. Employers can add assignments to their applications with an attachment, request a video submission, and track social media presence with every applicant on our platform. These tools give employees a voice and a platform to prove themselves while giving you insight into their work ethic, their personal lives, and how they might fit in your company.
Our Final Piece of Advice
If you remember one thing from this passage, remember this: You’re not just hiring a parent, your business will help support a family with just as many aspirations, dreams, and hopes that you have. Top Applicant is built to put the human element in the hiring process. So, as you fill your next position with our platform, don’t expect to hire the same way you always have.
The Human Way to Hire
Don’t get us wrong, AI is great for productivity. But no company will ever have a “take your chatbot to work” day. To give companies the best employees possible, we’re putting the human element in the modern hiring process. Fill your next position for free and truly get to know your applicants with Top Applicant. Log in to get started and sign up for more industry insights from our newsletter!
