Do Career Fairs Have to Suck?
June 29th, 2011 by Anna Lewis
No!
I swear. Our intrepid recruiting team has spent the past year conducting an exhaustive study into the matter. We thought we’d share a few thoughts on what’s detestable and what’s wonderful about the whole career fair experience.
When I was an undergrad, nothing could have made me attend a career fair. And that wasn’t just because I knew my liberal arts degrees were of little to no market value. It was because, like most of my peers, I knew that career fairs were a perverse version of an eighth-grade dance: recruiters (in bad suits) behind the tables; students (in bad suits) shuffling past; awkward glances exchanged; all in the hope of somehow (gulp) initiating a conversation that might somehow (gulp) get you closer to the Great Human Goal of giving/getting a résumé. Except, of course, for the gunners, usually marketing majors, who had long ago memorized something like, “I’m a detail-oriented multi-tasker with market-focused, transactional interconnectivity for providing organic solutions that defy the current conversation and integrate the future with what’s next.”
But, about a year ago, as we saw our recruiting needs increase, we began to wonder if recruiting larger intern classes would get faster and easier if we attended career fairs. All those computer science majors! All in one place! So we decided to give career fairs a try.
Because we’re nerds, we started out by reading a book: Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent. It covers all the nuts and bolts of planning career fairs and we highly recommend it for recruiters in small- to mid-sized companies. Then, we attended technical career fairs at four universities – Carnegie Mellon, Rutgers, Princeton, and Columbia .You can read about our results in detail here. Along the way, we made a discovery: career fairs do not have to suck. In fact, they can lead to Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
As long as you make the following five things happen:
1. Take advantage of alumni in your company.
We got great mileage out of going to the alma maters of employees and interns. Students love meeting alumni who have “made it in the real world.” Even better, visit schools where former interns are still students. Invite your former interns to hang out at your booth all day. They’ll love showing off a little and internship seekers will love the easy conversation. Best of all, no one (not you, not a senior dev, not even your CEO) can talk up the internship as effectively as someone who just experienced it.
2. Work with professors.
Career centers will offer a myriad of ways for you to advertise your upcoming presence on campus — the official career center job site, the official career fair manual, the Official Career Center Success Club Newsletter, etc — but one of the best ways to draw students’ attention is via their favorite professors. Students get a million emails a day from on-campus organizations. They’ll be more likely to take notice if a particular professor sends word of an internship to his or her computer science class. Know that professors are sometimes reluctant to promote one company over another, especially if they’re Marxists. (Real, live Marxists! Oh wait, those are mainly English professors.) But it’s worth sending an email to find out.
3. Don’t obsess over the location of your booth.
Recruit or Die and many other recruiting resources tell you to “obsess over location.” Don’t bother. The truth is that students don’t care where your booth is. Their livelihoods, their souls – nay, their very sex lives! — are at stake in this God-forsaken gym. They will systematically comb the aisles with booth maps in hand. They will see your booth. No matter where it is. Your real problem will be maintaining your stamina when you suddenly have a crowd of students five-deep waiting to talk to you.
4. Take water, chapstick, lozenges, granola bars, and a developer.
Career fairs can be physically grueling. You have to have the same two-minute interaction over and over again for six hours. Your feet will hurt. Your throat will hurt. You’ll need a partner. Someone to help lug materials around. Someone to take over while you “go get lunch” but secretly do some yoga in an empty hallway instead. And if, like me, you don’t have a technical background, make sure you take a developer with you. Some students will ask specific questions about the sorts of projects they’ll be working on – or technical questions about software development in general – and you’ll need someone who can provide meaningful, in-depth answers.
5. Believe in what you have to offer.
Seriously, people: believe! By which I mean, try to identify one or two unique things that you truly and honestly believe are outstanding about your internship and your company. (If there’s nothing outstanding about your internship or company, go home. Then get a new job.) You’ll then be able to talk to students with real excitement. You won’t sound — or feel — like a robot. Students will naturally respond positively. A few students might even relax and reveal a little about their own personalities and interests in the process. Suddenly, a two-minute interaction becomes a genuine conversation and, assuming the kid can code, you’ve probably just found yourself a star candidate.
Share this article
