Tell me about job fairs

Factual Questions
1

I’m thinking of relocating in a different area of the US. I’m a corporate-travel professional with additional experience in meeting planning.

Would it be conducive to me to attend job fairs in the area of the country in which I wish to relocate?
Are job fairs strictly put together strictly to interview and hire entry-level positions?

Can you tell me of your experiences with job fairs?

2

There are definitely job fairs that target positions above entry level. However, they usually are looking for people with 2+ years’ experience in a technical or medical/scientific field. Sometimes they make this experience a requirement to visit the job fair. I am not sure I have ever seen one that considered two years’ experience in general professional work to be a requirement. I think I recall seeing one with sales experience as a requirement.

If you are going to be in the area for other reasons and a job fair is going on, I don’t think it would be a waste of time for you to go to one. It would be a step in the right direction to get over employers’ natural tendency to believe you aren’t serious about relocating. Make the most of it as a networking opportunity.

I always advise people who are relocating to get an address and local phone number to list as contact info. Some employers don’t contact anyone who would need to relocate unless they are conducting a search beyond the local area.

Good luck on your search and relocation.

3

The job fair is just one more weapon in your jobhunting arsenal that should include:
Networking
Networking
Networking
Campus career services
Job fairs
Online job search (Monster, Careerbuilder, etc)
Direct resume submissions through company web sites
Want ads (still)

Lot of experience on both end of the job fair booth here. Your goals for a job fair should be to:

  1. get contact information
  2. submit resumes (and bring plenty)
  3. learn about the companies

Keep in mind, the people behind the table will probably be a combination of HR reps, recent hires and maybe a few managers. Their mood may range from happy to be out of the office to agitated and bored. They may be loathe to give you a business card because they don’t want a thousand emails the next day from job hopefuls, so don’t push it.

Try and show up early when there’s less candidates and the reps are still fresh. By the end of the day, I’m usually thinking “just shut up and give me your resume and get the fuck out of here so I can toss it in the trash”.

Keep in mind , they will probably need to go through a thousand resumes, most of which will be garbage.

4

I would definitely make use of your college’s alumni association. If the school is large enough, there should be alumni near the city to which you want to move.

You may also want to consider other aspects of your occupation; for example, non-profits often need event planners.

To directly address the OP, however, IMHO job fairs can be a huge waste of time. It’s hard to stand out when you’re one more person stopping by the booth, and some fairs seem to be geared more toward the third-shift forklift operator demographic than toward professionals. OTOH, I got my job through a job fair, so all bets are off. But in order to get to the company that hired me, I had to talk to several that didn’t. Ultimately, you won’t know until you get there. The key is to be realistic and not have any expectation that you’ll find the perfect job.

Robin

5

You have to go to job fairs that cator to your profession - IT, finanace, etc.

6

You have to go to job fairs that cator to your profession - IT, finance, etc.