Greetings,

That is how I got my first full-time job out of grad school.  We do what we have to do, and if that means working outside the field for a while, then so be it.  If that means emailing a dozen applications every week and taking the first position offered, then so be it.  The field is fairly saturated with new graduates, so I had no qualms about throwing everything into a small U-Haul truck and driving a few thousand miles to an institute that needed an employee.  A little bit of relocation debt is better than continuing to live in my parents' basement after finishing school.

Teenager jobs depend entirely on location and local economies.  Out here, many of the traditional teenage jobs are held by college-age people and much older people, because they need the money to survive.  The only place where I see teenagers working is at certain fast food places, because adults have the rest of the retail and restaurant jobs.  I would rather see a candidate who has shown initiative and an interest in the community through volunteering and interning (with demonstrable results), instead of someone who held a retail job during the summer.  But then again, in my part of rural New Mexico, family ties tend to remain strong and people are not kicked out of their parents' house as soon as they graduate from high school.  There is also a shortage of available and affordable housing.  What employers want in a candidate will be entirely subjective, and is based on location and nature of the job.