WASHINGTON — With a growing number of companies struggling to fill jobs with the right candidates, the leverage job seekers have has now spilled over to even the short-term, summer jobs market.
Hourly jobs posting site Snagajob, which has corporate offices in Arlington, surveyed hiring managers and job seekers in the retail, restaurant and hospitality industries and found the number one thing that summer job hunters want is flexibility.
The survey found that 36 percent of workers ranked flexibility as the most important perk they’re looking for and more than half of employers plan to offer it.
Summer job seekers include a wide variety of people, including schoolteachers and retirees. But the dominant group is high school and college students, and they don’t like traditional work schedules.
“Younger workers look at calendars the way they look at email. They think of it as a bit of a dinosaur,” Snagajob CEO Peter Harrison told WTOP. “They just like when they don’t have to schedule themselves weeks out in advance,” he said.
And teens and young adults are apparently in a position to make demands when searching for their next summer job.
“It’s a job seeker’s market, so it’s something that increasingly they can ask for and employers need to respond to,” Harrison said.
Employers are stepping up with other perks to attract summer workers too, with 56 percent surveyed saying they would offer employee discounts or coupons on merchandise. And 44 percent will give their summer hires free meals, up from just 19 percent last year.
Most employers expect to have their summer positions filled by the end of May — 73 percent said so. But perhaps evidence that it is harder to find those summer workers this year, just 82 percent of employers had filled summer openings by the end of May last year.
Summer job seekers also aren’t spending a whole lot of time finding one. Snagajob said that 15 percent have been able to find one they wanted in just one day.
