Getting a New Office Boy

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 8, 1912

Getting a New Office Boy

"About once in so often," said a business man, according to the Sun, "we need a new office boy, and then we advertise.

"Our advertisement calls for a boy who can fill certain requirements and conditions; he must of course be honest and intelligent and of a specific age, and he must live with his parents, and so on. We want a good, capable boy, and we state our requirements explicitly.

"We don't ask the boys to come here, but to answer by mail; and we may get a hundred answers. From these we reject at once those to which there is some obvious objection. We reject letters that are addressed with the envelope upside down, those with the stamp on the wrong end, and we may throw out those with a stamp put on carelessly at the right end. We don't want a careless boy.

"We throw out also letters addressed with a lead-pencil. As to the handwriting, it is not perhaps so essential as it once was that it should be excellent, this due to the very general use nowadays of the typewriter, but the writing must be clear and legible and the spelling correct.

"When we open the letters, we reject all that do not take notice of all the advertisement's conditions. We require, for instance, that the boys answering shall send also a letter from one or both of their parents, preferably from both. Usually, as a matter of fact, we get with the boy's letter one from the mother only. All lead-pencil letters we throw out, and also all letters written on the letter-heads of concerns with which the writers may now be employed. The boys may not know or they may not realize that they have no right to use the firm's letter-paper for their personal uses, but they ought to know it.

"We now eliminate the boys who live at too great a distance. They might get here all right, but they would want to get away on the minute to have time to get home; or, to put it in another way, we might not want to keep them late. The boy ought to be not only willing to devote himself to his work, but he ought to be so situated as to be able to do this comfortably. It is important that a boy should live within convenient distance of his work.

"Then we drop out the letters that are long and flowery. It is unfortunate that some boys think that such a letter should be of elaborate phraseology. What is really required is a simple, straightforward, direct letter that shows care by giving attention to every requirement and condition.

"Now we have, maybe, forty per cent of those letters left, and out of them we pick the most promising dozen, and to the writers of these we write making appointments inside two days, with an odd time appointment for each, not at, say 10 or 11 A. M., but at 10:20 or at 11:25 A. M., and here we strike, if the boys only knew it, a critical stage in the selection. If a boy is due at 10:20 and comes at 10:35, we mark him off without question. If a boy when he is looking for a job doesn't keep his first appointment to the dot, we don't want him.

"So in one way and another we reduce the number of considered candidates to a half-dozen, and from this number finally we select a boy and set him at work.

"And after all this labor do we finally get just the boy we want? Well, when we first began on this system, after we had at last selected our boy, we regarded it as settled, and threw away all the remaining applications; but now we keep that last half-dozen letters, because the boy we have chosen may not stay more than three days, and then the half-dozen remaining chosen applications are handy from which to make another selection.

"I wish there was some way of getting boys in general to understand that there never was a time in the world when there were such chances as there are right now for honest, intelligent boys ready to get in and work and keep working faithfully."