A New Way to Build Corporate Careers

No wonder workers who signed up to help build houses for poor people were ready to start hammering bright and early Friday.

The “volunteers” were summer interns and job candidates jockeying for positions with the big-time Los Angeles accounting firm that organized the event.

“They basically said, ‘If you don’t come come, you’re fired.’

” . . . No, I’m just kidding,” joked Kirby Wilkerson, a graduate business student who was assembling kitchen cabinets at a Habitat for Humanity construction site near Watts.

Actually, according to officials of the Arthur Andersen Co., the eight-hour stint of construction work on 96th Street was a recruitment tool aimed at persuading skilled young people to come to work for them.

With career opportunities at an all-time high, college students “are looking at things other than salary and job descriptions” when it comes to their first job, said Keith Holland, an Andersen recruiter.

“The hot term now is ‘work-life balance.’ That’s a big topic with job candidates.”

The young people swarming over six partially built two-story, four-bedroom homes said plenty of people have Generation X figured out all wrong.

“Our society has gone through a selfish phase,” said Jessica Schulman, a paint-spattered 21-year-old from Bloomington, Ind., who attends Indiana University. “Me and my generation are starting to rebel at that. Our generation has a different focus.”

Corporate volunteerism is an indicator of community ties that many of today’s college students are looking for when they choose an employer, said Schulman, who was using a long-handled roller to paint the eaves of a nearly completed dwelling.

“If the work culture is team-oriented, community work will follow. That’s important to me,” she said.

Cabinet builder Wilkerson, 27, an MBA candidate from USC, said there are fewer “big causes” that attract the public’s attention than there were in the 1960s and ‘70s. “I think we’re in a civic conscious age, but we just don’t get the recognition,” he said.

A few steps away, 21-year-old Lee Hunt, a senior from UC San Diego, was nailing rafters. He agreed that Generation X has gotten a bad rap.

“They stereotype us. . . . They look at my generation and think things like family values have dropped. They characterize us as only thinking of ourselves. But that’s not true for all of us,” Hunt said.

Andersen officials said management studies bear that out.

On Friday they were pointing to findings such as those by the Connecticut research firm RainmakerThinking Inc. that suggest that Americans born between 1963 and 1981 are looking for employers “active in corporate citizenship” and doing things you “can really put your arms around and see results.”

Still, summer intern Simon Holford, a graduate accounting student from the University of Texas in Austin, was surprised to find himself on 96th Street with a shovel in his hand Friday.

“It’s harder than being at the office,” said the 24-year-old, who is spending the summer on the 30th floor of the Library Tower in downtown Los Angeles.

“I never thought I’d be out here shoveling dirt.”