It’s career fair season again.
A three-day Career and Education fair concluded less than a week ago. And they have 65,000 jobs available. That is 1.85% of the Singapore working population. If all these are filled, Singapore unemployment rate is virtually ZERO.
You missed that?
Not to worry. There is another career fair by STJobs that will be held on the 28th and 29th of March at Suntec City. Right after that, you can look forward to Asia Talent Summit – it’s the only career fair that targets senior level executives with jobs across APAC.
But for many people, career fairs just seemed such a waste of time. It’s crowded, every exhibitor is so busy to talk to you and you don’t ever remember getting a call to bring your application to the next stage.
I’m not surprise. Many job seekers get little/zero mileage from career fairs. They do get a lot of freebies but that isn’t why you are there.
Let’s look at how a typical job seekers apply for jobs. They would rummage through newspapers or job portals and shoots out their resume as quickly as they can. So in an hour you probably have shot out to > 50 employers and recruiters. Now you can sit back and read a book, thinking that the recipients would be fighting out gladiator style to secure your service and your phone line would be jammed by incoming calls.
Except you get crickets.
That is usually because the ease of convenience of job applications has made many of us lazy and complacent when it comes to job search. We just double down and increase the quantity, thinking that it is a numbers game.
Now imagine you have 200,000 job seekers doing the same thing. Employers and Recruiters would drown in resumes and applications when they turn on their computer.
With so much unnecessary online traffic that is bogging down precious time of HR and recruiters, career fair appear as a great alternative to actual recruiting. However unwanted traffic persist, they only morph from online to on foot.
For online application, the recipient could easily move on from unsuitable candidate. You can’t do that when you are face-to-face with a candidate, no matter how unsuitable he/she may be.
So you can imagine how tired the recruiter would be after 8 hours at the booth?
For candidates who are simply applying their online job application approach to career fair, they are going to waste another day with only a goodie bag to lament to back home.
There is a saying in Mandarin. Loosely translated it meant “Ten minutes of stage time is a result of ten years of efforts”. Many job seekers do zero planning when it comes to career fair. They do not know what to expect and choose to let the situation and circumstance guide them instead.
If you are not in control of your destiny, then you are part of someone else’s.
A trip to the career fair can be fruitful but you need to work at it and do lots of prep work to stand out from the crowd and finish as a career fair hero.
I will be one of the speaker at STJobs Express 2015 over 28/29 Mar 3pm. Hope to see you there!