At the Job Fair

When I left Corporate America and headed off into this strange and frightening place they call “Academia” I told myself that whatever else happened, at least I was saying “good-bye” to some of the worst aspects of a career in business, including cubicle farms and job fairs. College professors don’t go to job fairs as such; they apply for individual openings in a business school that has the correct balance of applied versus theoretical (and macro versus micro) to suit their requirements, and only very junior faculty in institutions which are too poor to build a new business complex will ever be assigned to share an office. The sense of relief was short-lived, however, as within hours of my arrival at Michigan State I’d been assigned to one of six workstations built into a disused conference room – a very small cube farm, but a cube farm just the same. Still, I got assigned to share an office after the first year was up, and had fondly imagined that I was past such things – until last week, when I attended my first job fair in over five years…

If you’ve ever been at a cocktail party with two or three thousand other people, none of who you know and none of whom have any particular reason to like you, you’ve got a basic idea of what goes on at a job fair – except there’s no alcohol, no music, no food, no party games, everyone is in full business dress (or at least something they fondly imagine to be business dress), the climate control is stuck (either on “Southwestern Desert in August” or “Arctic Chill,” depending on the season) and everyone is standing around in long lines that don’t go anywhere. If you’re getting the impression that I believe the average job fair pales in comparison to, say, being repeatedly hit in the groin with a large fish or thrown off the roof of the business complex into a dumpster, that’s only because I do. I had hoped that since this job fair was being put on by the Business School itself that it might be better than the last few such events I had attended, but I knew from personal experience that there’s only so much you can do to keep a job fair from turning into an elaborate (and expensive) game of freeze-tag…

You see, the problem is the websites. Back in the day, actual hiring managers attended job fairs along with recruiters and senior Human Resources personnel, and they met job-seekers and talked about what the company needed and what the applicant could offer. The events would last two or sometimes three days, and we’d work in shifts, since that one key person you needed to find could turn up at any moment, like a gold nugget in a screen. Compared to the effort required to read dozens of resumes that arrived by mail every day, the hours spent at a table in a convention hall or conference center were well worth it. Today, though, most resumes are received via the company’s HR website (a lot of companies don’t even bother with Monster or Career Builder anymore), and the HR department will have software to pick out the specific credentials you want; you just search by keywords (“accounting” for an accounting job, “supervised” or “managed” for a supervisory job; “alligator” or “crocodile” for an alligator wrestling job, or whatever) and then sort by years of experience, credentials or degrees…

Consequently, most of what goes on in a job fair these days is standing in line for half an hour, finding out that the live people are either looking for a single specific applicant type (a bachelor’s degree in Thermal Duct Deployment and 3 years experience in deploying left-handed thermal ducts, whatever that means), or that they’re not accepting resumes at all. In either case, unless you would fit some immediate (and desperate) need the company has, you’ll probably just be told to visit their website and apply online. You will be told this over and over again, until you want to scream. And that’s just the beginning…