The Ethics of Job Fairs

A few weeks ago I attended the Business Job Fair at Michigan State, and as I was on my way home I started wondering about the ethics of such an event. On the face of it these things are pure altruism, or at most enlightened self-interest: the more MSU graduates who get jobs right out of school, the better the school looks to both prospective students and prospective donors, and the better it will do. But even if the school’s motivates are pure as the driven snow (and at any major university these days I would not bet money on that), some of the shenanigans that go on in these events don’t appear to be, and some of them are outright fraud. I thought we should probably take a closer look…

First, let’s establish the obvious. Even today, when every major company has an employment page on their website, some people will attract interest at a job fair, and some of them will still get job offers right on the spot. Granted that most of these people will have engineering degrees (or, at Michigan State, Supply Chain and Logistics degrees), we can’t really say that the job fair is a waste of time or money for everyone involved. In fact, even people who are not actively recruited at the job fair may learn about a company that they would like to work for, or discover a potential employer in their community that they had never realized was present. And we should not discount the intellectual and emotional benefits; some people do gain valuable practice in pitching themselves to employers, some get help with their resumes (or learn that they need to make one), some people learn that jeans and a dress shirt isn’t really “business dress” as such, and some people undoubtedly feel better about their frustrating job search for handing out a dozen resumes…

That said, I think we are justified in asking if a job fair is entirely a good thing. Some companies are only going to be trolling for suckers who will buy product from them and attempt to resell it (and think this constitutes a job), while others are going to be running actual Ponzi schemes (or MLM operations that look just like one) or trying to convince young and inexperienced people that working on commission really is an easy way to make lots of money. Some companies are going to hold out offers of jobs that require a year-long training cycle on which you bring in millions for the company but are paid barely minimum wage, and some are going to offer “internships” in which you will be paid nothing in return for duties that will teach you nothing about their industry or the jobs in it. And if some people will take heart at dropping off dozens of resumes, others will surely lose it on being told “sorry; we haven’t got anything for an applicant like you” dozens of additional times…

What makes this a question of ethics is that all of the people involved, except for the applicants themselves, know that this is largely a collection of smoke and mirrors, and that only a small fraction of the people who attend will gain anything by doing so. Job fairs that charge for admission are pushing this envelope the farthest, but even a relatively benign sponsor like Michigan State knows that they are improving their own image at the expense of a non-zero number of participants who will be harmed in some way by attending. So I have to ask: given all of the false pretenses and outright lies handed out at a job fair, can we reasonably participate in such activities? Does the advantage to the percentage of people (whatever that actually is) who get jobs at such an even outweigh the harm done to people who don’t, or who wind up being scammed out of their money, their dignity, or years of their lives? Should we refuse to take part in such events and force employers to come up with reasonable channels for obtaining jobs, or can we just assume that the participants are adults, and can make their own choices?

It’s worth thinking about…