First Jobs Aren't Child's Play

It's 5:30 p.m., and the sky over Pittsburgh is darkening. Most of Emily O'Brien's peers are on their way home or hitting the bars. But she's still in the office. She and her boss just returned from Mexico, and now she's on the phone with one of her company's biggest customers there, trying to sound intelligent -- in Spanish (not her first language).

O'Brien works for FreeMarkets OnLine Inc., a booming startup that organizes interactive online events in which suppliers bid for customers' raw-materials business. She's an assistant market maker -- a job that's part marketing, part customer service, and part sales. Whenever online bidding gets out of hand, she helps put out the fire. When a client wants $10 million worth of wood, she calls dozens of saw mills to see whether they can fill the bill.

It's a great job, offering lots of responsibility and autonomy -- plus stock options. "There are no artificial barriers to promotion here, and my input is valued," O'Brien says. "There's no thought control, and no vertical hierarchy." It's also O'Brien's first corporate gig. She's 24 years old.

FreeMarkets puts many of its entry-level hires into jobs like O'Brien's, and that makes the company exceptionally attractive to talented college graduates. Because the dark truth about entry-level jobs is this: Most of them suck. Companies post recent grads to remote silos, where they pay their dues by doing scut work. Lacking context or guidance -- much less decent leadership -- young recruits suffer mostly in silence until better opportunities appear.

That nonstrategy worked nicely for decades, but it smacks of wild luxury today. Employers can't afford to pay college-grad salaries for menial work that high-school kids could just as easily do. More to the point, now that corporate loyalty is disappearing and now that career tracks are becoming less certain, smart college grads aren't going to waste time in jobs that aren't great right now. According to the National Association of College Employers, 11.6% of the class of 1997 -- more than double the number from five years ago -- changed jobs within a year of graduation.

Think of it this way: You can make entry-level jobs exercises in mediocrity. Or you can give recruits real tasks, tangible resources and support, and room to move. If the rookies fail, maybe you don't want them anyway. But if they pull it off, you can give them even more responsibility. And once word gets out that your company offers high-quality entry-level jobs, more of the best prospects will look your way for work.

Startups like FreeMarkets are forced to think about entry-level hiring in precisely that way, because rapid growth creates incessant demand for talented people. There's simply no room for wasted effort. But some established employers get it as well. Charles Schwab has designed its Wings Program to let young people explore the company through a variety of temporary assignments before they choose a permanent position. Enterprise Rent-A-Car hires more new college grads than almost any company in the nation, assigning most of them to be field-office entrepreneurs. First Chicago, a venerable commercial bank, lavishes resources on a select group of recruits, whom it calls "First Scholars."

These companies grasp the particular psychological makeup of first-time employees, who enter the workforce with high expectations and extreme needs. They expose their charges to jobs across the organization, and they allow recruits to see how stars in the company function. Their managers devote time and money to making young workers smarter faster. Most important, these employers have done away with the decrepit culture of dues paying. They make sure that young workers have meaningful, interesting tasks to do from day one. That's what makes a great first job. In fact, that's what makes any job great.

"Every Private Is Somebody's Kid"

For the turbocharged Emily O'Brien, any entry-level job would have been a disappointment. After graduating from Georgetown, she worked for a year in Asia and Latin America, where she organized educational programs for native high-school students. Once stateside, she had difficulty finding a job that promised the same degree of stimulation and independence. She even considered taking the free-agent route as a marketing consultant for outdoor-education programs. "Not being bored was my prerequisite," she says.

Try getting inside the heads of O'Brien and of people like her: They've got serious wanderlust, big ideas, and a low tolerance for busy work. But they're also young -- still anxious, still unsure of what to expect. "There are very few adult rites of passage in the United States," notes Glen Meakem, 35, FreeMarkets's cofounder and CEO. "For better or worse, the entry-level job is the way many people make the transition into adulthood."