Eve Tahmincioglu, MSNBC’s career columnist, has a decidedly downbeat story today about job fairs. She reports that many professional and technical attendees at these events find themselves waiting in long lines only to discover that few employers are really hiring.

Just the words “job fair” or “career fair” suggest an abundance of potential employers and potential jobs, and that idea seems to attract huge numbers of job seekers. One job fair at Rancho Cucamonga, California, earlier this month attracted four times the expected number of attendees, forcing police to turn away others who wanted to attend the event.

Tahmincioglu says that in today’s brutal job market few companies have jobs to offer, including the ones that set up at a job fair. She notes that many employers participate in job fairs today for promotional purposes or as a form of community outreach–not necessarily to fill job openings. Other employers use job fairs to get information on future job applicants, to have candidates in the pipeline when the economy improves and hiring starts.

None of that, of course, helps unemployed workers immediately needing a job. Tahmincioglu tells of job fair attendees who were surprised to discover the companies would not even take their resumes when offered. She found that many companies prefer receiving resumes online so that they can be managed electronically.

(Memo to employers at job fairs: If you don’t want to sort through a pile of paper, why not take electronic resumes at a job fair on flash-memory drives, or from laptops and smart-phones over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth?)

As Dave Jensen points out in his February Tooling Up column, in today’s tough job market, you have to do much more than attend job fairs. You need to combine job fairs with the other job-search tools: informational interviewing, networking, responding to employment ads, and headhunters. “You’ve got to have all the bases covered,” says Jensen.

Tahmincioglu quotes recruiter Jay Meschke who says you need to do your homework before going to a job fair: “Find out who’s attending the fair, whether those employers are really looking to fill positions and what type of jobs they are looking to fill.” For scientists and engineers, there are some career fairs, such as the European Career Fair at MIT, that are regular annual events and include seminars and sessions with employers arranged in advance. These events will likely have better opportunities than the general job fairs hastily arranged in suburban hotel ballrooms.

And if you attend a career fair, know what to do before, during, and after the event. Even if you do not find employers hiring right away, you can still make good contacts in the companies and learn about their future plans. You may not get a job at the job fair, but it can still be worth your time.

By Alan Kotok on April 27, 2009

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