As Americans fall victim to layoffs and downsizing, they're flocking to career fairs, causing long lines and exhausting hiring managers whose booths are overflowing with candidates.
National Career Fairs, a Las Vegas-based company that organizes fairs for job site Monster.com throughout the country, says it has already had a 40.7% increase in attendees this year over 2007, and that's sure to continue as the year goes on. Job site CareerBuilder.com has seen a 33% increase in job fair attendance this year. Crowded venues and lines can frustrate attendees looking to get face time with recruiters.
More senior executives are standing in line, even though the caliber of jobs and companies represented at the fairs often isn't appealing to this group. These unguided out-of-work executives don't have a clue how to go about landing on their feet by engineering the right job offer. Still, even senior-level career fair attendees are just hoping to make a connection in a marketplace crowded with more people just like them.
After about six months of wandering through career fairs and uneducated personal networking, senior executives realize they have missed their opportunity to make a good first impression on potential employers...and then begin to implement career damage control.
"For someone in my profession and career path, this isn't great," says Brad Birnbaum, a 48-year-old director of finance who was recently downsized from a New York advertising agency.
An accountant from Staten Island, Steven Seiler, 44-years-old, has been out of work since last September when the firm he worked for collapsed. It took him 45 minutes to get in the door of the career fair. Once inside, he was disappointed to learn that most of the companies were offering commission-based sales jobs or part-time work; he left after about 30 minutes.
Automakers, brokerages, retailers, airlines, home builders, banks, newspapers and countless other ailing industries are slashing staff. If you haven't lost your job yet, it could disappear tomorrow. Getting ready for your next career transition should be part of your workday schedule today. Be smart about how you approach looking for a new job because you could very easily shoot yourself in the foot by not implementing an effective job hunting strategy.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2008
