The Grace Hopper Celebration is meant to unite women in tech. This year droves of men came looking for jobs.
Tangentially related, but are job fairs even worth it? In my limited experience, you wait in a long line for someone to tell you to apply online. I was better off getting a list of employers who were attending, and then looking through each of their websites.
If recruiters are trying to discriminate, and you have the attributes they’re discriminating in favor of, getting a face-to-face with them can be a way to get your foot in the door that doesn’t leave a paper trail.
Which really highlights how bad the job market is now. All the recruiters at this job fair are going to share the sentiments the organizers are expressing in this article. They’re there to hire women and are pissed at all the men who showed up, so significantly less likely to hire them… but those dudes are so desperate they still gave it a shot.
I’ve been on the opposite side. A company I used to work for did a table at a job fair once. The candidates who showed up to talk to us were mostly under qualified for the entry level position we were trying to fill. And by that, I mean that people with zero knowledge, training or experience in our industry. Even one class or a little knowledge might have sufficed.
We had one guy lingering near our table who really seemed to want to work with us even though his skill set didn’t fit our needs at all and we told him as much. The whole thing was a big waste of time for us, we never did another one after that.
>hiring for entry level
>saying people are underqualified
The problem is with the companies, not the job seekers. Actually offer true entry level positions, and actually hire the people that apply.
Entry level doesn’t necessarily mean literally anyone can do it. What I meant was basically first job out of college. Except you could apply while you were still in college. If that isn’t entry level, I don’t know what is.
under qualified for the entry level position we were trying to fill.
Was it really “entry level” then?
Yes. This wasn’t an open “literally anyone can do it” job. It’s entry level as in starting a path to a career. A certain aptitude is definitely necessary.
Let me ask you this, is a job that requires a two year degree and zero years of experience entry level? Because our requirements were even less than that.
Entry level means different things in different fields. Most skilled jobs do require some knowledge about the field, but don’t necessarily require previous work experience.
No. Mostly you run around collect business cards and then go online to apply for the jobs… that you could have done without going to the job fair in the first place.
TBH It’s a huge red flag if a recruiter wants upfront payment with no guarantee at the end of it (or even if they ‘guarantee’ one). If the recruiters are so desperate for someone they want to organise a job fair, they can bloody well pay for it themselves.
I think I figured it out… only rarely you’d get immediate interviews, but the idea is you get LinkedIn contacts to chat with later and industry insight, and something to tell recruiters/hiring managers that you did, but you dress it up in a way that shows you look for opportunity like “I met members of [industry/company] at a recruiting conference in [town]”. I found industry conferences to be more useful than jobfairs in this respect, but those can be a little to a lot expensive.
Otherwise it’s pretty much just being told to scan QR codes, business cards and maybe getting a couple plastic cups and pens.
All in all I say job hunting is such an awful game.
It depends on the job fair. My mid-tier university’s career fair was as you describe. From talking to (women) classmates who attended Grace Hopper on the other hand it sounded very worth it. The lines were short (in the mid 2010s anyway) and many of the companies in attendance were scheduling next-day, single round interviews with job offers sent out by the end of the week. I have no idea if it’s still like that but I can’t say I’m surprised that, given how the tightly pool of entry-level jobs offering visa sponsorships has contracted, affected male students have gotten desperate and shameless enough to try it.
I remember when a lady tried to scam me into an MLM at a job fair I attended several years ago.
I got scammed into attending a seminar for “business women empowering business women.” It was just this lady giving a talk about what a great job coach she is and then pressuring everyone into hiring her for $300 per month. She saw me as a mark and was really targeting me, I actually wrote the check for her first three months and was about to hand it to her, but saw the look in her eyes, looking at my check and realized I should just tear it up.
My experience of going to a tech fair was:
- Great discussion with sourcing recruiter of Big Name Company, who loves CV and experience
- Get Business Card and told to apply online
- Apply online
- Ghosted/immediately rejected.
They’re basically box-ticking exercises for companies that want to work with specific organisations.
