Summer is coming, and you may be thinking about employing some teenagers. Here’s some lawyerly advice: proceed with caution. Employing teens requires you as an employer to foresee potential problems and correct them very early.

Here are five tips for hiring teens:

1. Safety: You have to be much more safety-conscious when you employ teens. In 2014, workers ages 15-19 had more than twice as many injuries that sent them to the emergency room than employees over age 25.

Your company has a legal duty, according to OSHA, to provide a safe working environment for all employees, which means you need to engage in extensive safety training with new teen employees. Cover the most common workplace hazards and injuries such as slips, trips and falls, chemical exposure, burns and cuts, eye injuries, machinery malfunctions, and strains and sprains, as well as any known hazards specific to your workplace.

Remember that teenagers are often uncomfortable acknowledging their ignorance or inexperience, so they may not ask questions that would indicate that they don’t clearly comprehend your training or instructions. They also may not learn without extensive repetition of the rules. Don’t assume that stating a safety rule one time is going to sufficiently train a teen worker.

2. Sexual Harassment: Many recent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforcement actions have shown that teenagers are very vulnerable when it comes to sexual harassment. They need as much if not more training than your more mature employees in how to recognize, prevent and report harassment, even if the job is not considered long term for that teen. Continue reading Five Tips for Hiring Teenagers →