Menino is speaking the language of start-ups to get their attention for the campaign, in which he hopes to place about 3,000 students with private companies. He’s starting on the Internet, where the mayor’s office will launch the website www.bostonsummerjobs.org sometime today, and will take to Twitter and Facebook to promote the effort.
In past years, the mayor’s summer jobs campaign has placed young people at more traditional companies, like State Street Corp. and Partners HealthCare. Those firms are still involved, but there are new participants in newer industries, such as the clean-energy storage provider FastCap Systems Corp. and Gemvara, the online jeweler.
“We take in a lot of college interns,’’ said Audrey Lampert, who coordinates hiring at Gemvara. “It was kind of out of curiosity to see what it would be like to have a high school student, and it was a terrific experience.’’
Lampert said Gemvara, which has 70 employees, will bring in at least one Boston student this summer.
The question is whether high school students have the skills that tech start-ups are looking for. Those companies tend to hire college students who want to build websites to fill summer positions. “The types of things that we are looking for in a start-up space, would be skills like Web design and HTML coding,’’ said Bruce Kasrel, head of marketing for Buzzient, a Boston enterprise software company founded in 2008. “Finding that kind of kid is a challenge.’’
But it’s not impossible. If there’s a new, young Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook cofounder, somewhere in Boston, Kasrel wants to hear from them. “There are plenty of teenagers who can grasp this fairly quickly,’’ he said.
Nationally, technology companies aren’t known for hiring teens in the summer, said Andrew Sum, an economics professor who heads the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. The 30 percent of US high school students who found jobs last summer, he said, were mostly working in retail, fast food, or entertainment, such as in movie theaters.
