July 15, 2025 • 14 mins
Career Fairs - which may feel like an anachronism in 2025 - turn out to be deceptively fertile places for employers and job hunters alike; we speak with an expert who has some helpful advice for first-timers and introverts braving these potentially intimidating events.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
When you think of job hunting these days, your mind
probably goes straight to the digital realm, online applications, virtual interviews,
endless scrolling through job boards. But there's a piece of
the job search puzzle that refuses to fade into the past,
the in person career fair. I'm Avery Thompson, and on
(00:22):
this episode of On the Job, we'll explore why these
face to face events still matter stick around. On a
recent Thursday, I drove down to the nearby city of
San Antonio to visit what I expected to be a
relic of the past job fair. To be honest, I
(00:43):
wasn't expecting much. I mean, isn't everyone finding their job
online these days? Thank you very much. Only when I
walked into the assembly hall, I was overwhelmed by the
sights and sounds. There was nothing depressing or archaic about
this job fair. In fact, the room was jam packed
(01:04):
along every bit of wall space. Company reps and recruiters
stood behind tables cluttered with logos and paraphernalia, and on
the other side of those tables sometimes more than a
dozen people stood waiting in line for the chance to
introduce themselves and hand over their resume, almost shoulder to
shouldering here, mostly the people are dressed professionally. To help
(01:25):
understand the enduring role jobfare still play in today's increasingly
digital workspace, I called up Chris Fitzpatrick, an HR pro
with nearly twenty years in the field, and a good
chunk of Chris's work life was spent at job fares,
standing behind tables, handing out flyers and collecting a few
thousand resumes.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
It's putting it mildly. I often say that I've interviewed
somewhere around sixty or seventy thousands individuals.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
With numbers that high. Chris offered his own visual to
drive the point home.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I estimated that the number of people I've met at
career fairs in my lifetime would roughly be the capacity
that would fit into the football field in Detroit, Michigan,
where the Lions play and frequently lose to my beloved
Green Bay Packers.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Chris first fell in love with job fairs as an
alumni rep for his alma mater, and as a naturally
outgoing inquisitive guy. He really enjoyed the experience and it
was such a natural feeling.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
It felt like I'd been doing it for years, even
though I was only doing it for the first time,
and from there it pretty much all fell into place.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Now, having attended literally hundreds of job fairs, Chris Fitzpatrick
can tell you that no two fares are exactly like.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Let's take NNG alone. I think I've been to thirty
five forty career fairs just at that one school. There
are similarities, there's no doubt, but the students are different.
Sometimes something as simple as your table location will completely
change how that experience is, both for the employer and
(03:02):
for the job seeker, and it's never the same experience twice.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Once Chris got thinking about the many career fairs he attended,
a few memorable ones came to mind.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
While I was at a career fair once where I
found myself with FedEx on my left and ups on
my right, and I remember laughing and asking them if
I was going to be in the middle of a
little uh special delivery turf war.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
But that delivery showdown was nothing compared to what we'll
call the cookie incident.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
I come to find out that my table is directly
next to a recruiting representative from Otis Spunkmeyer Cookies that
on its face seems innocuous enough. However, the gentleman from
Otis spunk Meyer shows up with a table top oven
(03:52):
and for the next three hours is baking fresh Otis
Spunkmeyer cookies four feet away from me. I took every
bit of willpower that I had not to eat ten
of these things.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Sadly, Otis Spunkmeyer was not at the career fair I attended,
but there was a wide variety of companies, everything from
big corporations to small local businesses, and Chris Fitzpatrick says
that variety is one of the great strengths of job
fares because it exposes job seekers to industries and companies
(04:24):
they might not otherwise have discovered when job hunting online.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
One of the first things I'll tell a student is
to go in with an open mind, because if they
go in there knowing that there are only three companies
there that they want to work for, and they don't
take the opportunity to meet some of the other organizations
that they're less familiar with, they're cheating themselves out of
a great networking opportunity and a potential career path.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Career fairs can also cater specifically to certain industries or
segments of the labor force. You can have one job
fair dedicated to college students and another full of farmers.
And in recent years we've seen a rise in online
or virtual career fairs that allow people from a much
larger geographic footprint to attend from the comfort of their home.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
What's fascinating about job fares is that they've always managed
to be what the industry needs at the time the
industry needs it.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Regardless of what form these fares take, Chris says, they
still offer the same thing.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
I think with anything else, technology plays a role. Technology
changes everything. But I also think that we're starting to
realize in a world of AI, and in a world
of hypertechnology and big data and analytics and keywords, that
there's still no pure substitute to the one to one
(05:58):
connection with another human being, with a person.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
In other words, even in an age of algorithms, we're
still wired for real human conversations. When we come back
from the break, we'll hear from some of the attendees
at the San Antonio Career Fair, and for those of
you on the job hunt, Chris Fitzpatrick will offer some
insider tips on how to best utilize a fair near you.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Looking for a job is lonely, endless, searching, phone calls
that go nowhere, applications that vanish into thin air. What
if you could link with dozens of local companies who
are hiring right now with just one connection. That's Express
Employment Professionals. Find us at expresspros dot com. One connection,
(06:44):
endless opportunities and no fees ever for job seekers Express
Employment Professionals expresspros dot com.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
We're back talking with Chris Fitzpatrick about the enduring effectness
of job fares in today's increasingly online job market. And
I'll confess that I never had much success with job fares.
Believe it or not, I'm incredibly shy, and so I
found the prospect of having to talk to a room
full of people really intimidating. Actually I still do so
(07:19):
my visit to San Antonio wasn't much different, but for
the sake of our show, I swallowed my nerves and
approached a table. My name is Laura.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
I'm the warehouse manager at the Selma, Texas facility.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Well brings you out here today. We're just out here
and looking for some good people. We're hiring. We're very busy.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Our facility manufactured seals for a semiconnector in a camerom environment, and.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Maybe Laura at Green Tweed Technologies just had the gift
of the gab, but it wasn't as bad as I
expected it to be. Still, our career fair guru Chris
Fitzpatrick says that social anxiety is a fairly common concern
for potential career fair attendees.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Career fairs historically probably favored more extroverted individuals who step
into a large room and see dozens or hundreds of
companies and they get excited saying I'm going to get
four job offers from today alone, and it's going to
(08:17):
be incredible, and they go in there very confident. But
for individuals who are more introverted, that could be absolutely mortifying.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
But this doesn't mean that the less gregarious among us
have to skip career fairs entirely.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
One strategy for an individual who may feel a little
bit intimidated or overwhelmed by that experience is to go
in with a plan, work out a personal roadmap, saying, Okay,
I know that there are four or five companies that
I'm prioritizing that I want to go meet, and to
(08:51):
focus on clearing one at a time.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Making an initial game plan is part of Chris's three
phase approach to making the most out of care fairs.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
There's the pre fair phase, which is all the preparation
work that anybody does prior to the moment they step
foot into the building where the career fair is being held.
That's the creation of the resume, the creation of the
LinkedIn profile, the selection of the career fair attire, mapping
(09:21):
out which organizations they want to visit. This is all
part of that prefair preparation process, and you can tell
very quickly the individuals who put a lot of effort
into their preparation, the ones who put no effort into
the preparation, and then everybody in between.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Then comes the fair itself, a world when of conversations
and handshakes.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
The actual career fair itself, the thing that you've been
building toward for this whole time, is far and away
the shortest of these three phases, because it lasts, let's say,
one to four hours, and then it's over, and your
interaction with each individual organization probably is not going to
last more than two or three minutes, especially if that
organization has a line.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
But Chris says just as important to What happens at
the fair is what you do after it.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Am I going back, Am I making a LinkedIn connection?
Am I sending a thank you email? Am I doing
more in depth research on the company, on the organization?
Am I going to apply? Let me now check to
see do I have any connections who work at that
company whom I can ask questions to. Are there alumni
(10:31):
from my university working at that company whom I can
request to connect with? So that post phase is incredibly important.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Chris is an obvious believer in the power of job fares,
but he also knows they aren't magic. Not everyone that
attends one leaves with a job. But he says, even
for the people who don't get a job offer on
the spot, they shouldn't discredit the residual effects of attending.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Because, first of all, you never know if that company
is going to need to hire you five ten years
from now, and you want to have a good reputation,
and you never know if the recruiter who was working
at that table is going to end up with another
company and remember you from that interaction in a good
way or a bad.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Way, And from the other side of the table. Career
fairs continue to hold a lot of value for employers.
There are a chance to get your business name out
there and to meet a diverse array of candidates in
one place, saving time and resources.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
So both in front of the table and behind the table,
being open minded and going in there with as few
preconceived notions as possible is key to mutual success.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Chris Fitzpatrick says that career fairs also give him an
opportunity to read the economic tea leaves.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
I went to a career fair back in two thousand
and eight during the significant economic downturn that we were
experiencing then, where seven organizations show up. Three of them
were recruiting for the United States military. And I've seen
career fairs where three hundred organizations showed up in the
(12:10):
middle of a talent war.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
And fares that cater to college students give Chris some
insights into industry trends that might be coming down the pike.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
College career fairs give me a chance to put my
finger on the pulse of early and emerging trends. So,
for example, before cybersecurity really blew up as an industry,
I started noticing more and more students were highlighting that
as being a course of interest and an area of focus.
(12:42):
Same thing with data analytics. Now with machine learning and AI.
We've been hearing more about AI specifically, I say, over
the last two years, but it really started showing up
on student resumes five six years ago.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Speaking of those college career fairs, according to a poll
by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than
half of college students attended a career fair in the
past year, and of those over forty five percent received
an interview and nearly a quarter eventually received the job offer,
which I get to say is pretty impressive. At the
(13:19):
risk of stating the obvious, job fares will not be
replacing online applications or other methods like referrals and professional connections,
but career fairs are proving to be a surprisingly valuable
and resilient piece of the job hunting puzzle.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
I absolutely think that career fairs can play a complimentary
role to an online application. I think it's important to
look at each of those different facets of the job
search as part of a symbiotic relationship.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
So if you're listening to this and thinking you should
start incorporating career fairs into your next job hunt. I'll
leave you with one last piece of advice from Chris Fitzpatrick.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Go there, try to connect as best you can with
another human being. Put your best foot forward and try
it to overthink it. If we all lead with empathy,
we end up with a much better opportunity to connect
and have a positive impact.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
And if you're lucky, Otis Spunkmeyer will be there from
the job I'm Avery Thompson.
When you think of job hunting these days, your mind
probably goes straight to the digital realm, online applications, virtual interviews,
endless scrolling through job boards. But there's a piece of
the job search puzzle that refuses to fade into the past,
the in person career fair. I'm Avery Thompson, and on
(00:22):
this episode of On the Job, we'll explore why these
face to face events still matter stick around. On a
recent Thursday, I drove down to the nearby city of
San Antonio to visit what I expected to be a
relic of the past job fair. To be honest, I
(00:43):
wasn't expecting much. I mean, isn't everyone finding their job
online these days? Thank you very much. Only when I
walked into the assembly hall, I was overwhelmed by the
sights and sounds. There was nothing depressing or archaic about
this job fair. In fact, the room was jam packed
(01:04):
along every bit of wall space. Company reps and recruiters
stood behind tables cluttered with logos and paraphernalia, and on
the other side of those tables sometimes more than a
dozen people stood waiting in line for the chance to
introduce themselves and hand over their resume, almost shoulder to
shouldering here, mostly the people are dressed professionally. To help
(01:25):
understand the enduring role jobfare still play in today's increasingly
digital workspace, I called up Chris Fitzpatrick, an HR pro
with nearly twenty years in the field, and a good
chunk of Chris's work life was spent at job fares,
standing behind tables, handing out flyers and collecting a few
thousand resumes.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
It's putting it mildly. I often say that I've interviewed
somewhere around sixty or seventy thousands individuals.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
With numbers that high. Chris offered his own visual to
drive the point home.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I estimated that the number of people I've met at
career fairs in my lifetime would roughly be the capacity
that would fit into the football field in Detroit, Michigan,
where the Lions play and frequently lose to my beloved
Green Bay Packers.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Chris first fell in love with job fairs as an
alumni rep for his alma mater, and as a naturally
outgoing inquisitive guy. He really enjoyed the experience and it
was such a natural feeling.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
It felt like I'd been doing it for years, even
though I was only doing it for the first time,
and from there it pretty much all fell into place.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Now, having attended literally hundreds of job fairs, Chris Fitzpatrick
can tell you that no two fares are exactly like.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Let's take NNG alone. I think I've been to thirty
five forty career fairs just at that one school. There
are similarities, there's no doubt, but the students are different.
Sometimes something as simple as your table location will completely
change how that experience is, both for the employer and
(03:02):
for the job seeker, and it's never the same experience twice.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Once Chris got thinking about the many career fairs he attended,
a few memorable ones came to mind.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
While I was at a career fair once where I
found myself with FedEx on my left and ups on
my right, and I remember laughing and asking them if
I was going to be in the middle of a
little uh special delivery turf war.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
But that delivery showdown was nothing compared to what we'll
call the cookie incident.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
I come to find out that my table is directly
next to a recruiting representative from Otis Spunkmeyer Cookies that
on its face seems innocuous enough. However, the gentleman from
Otis spunk Meyer shows up with a table top oven
(03:52):
and for the next three hours is baking fresh Otis
Spunkmeyer cookies four feet away from me. I took every
bit of willpower that I had not to eat ten
of these things.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Sadly, Otis Spunkmeyer was not at the career fair I attended,
but there was a wide variety of companies, everything from
big corporations to small local businesses, and Chris Fitzpatrick says
that variety is one of the great strengths of job
fares because it exposes job seekers to industries and companies
(04:24):
they might not otherwise have discovered when job hunting online.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
One of the first things I'll tell a student is
to go in with an open mind, because if they
go in there knowing that there are only three companies
there that they want to work for, and they don't
take the opportunity to meet some of the other organizations
that they're less familiar with, they're cheating themselves out of
a great networking opportunity and a potential career path.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Career fairs can also cater specifically to certain industries or
segments of the labor force. You can have one job
fair dedicated to college students and another full of farmers.
And in recent years we've seen a rise in online
or virtual career fairs that allow people from a much
larger geographic footprint to attend from the comfort of their home.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
What's fascinating about job fares is that they've always managed
to be what the industry needs at the time the
industry needs it.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Regardless of what form these fares take, Chris says, they
still offer the same thing.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
I think with anything else, technology plays a role. Technology
changes everything. But I also think that we're starting to
realize in a world of AI, and in a world
of hypertechnology and big data and analytics and keywords, that
there's still no pure substitute to the one to one
(05:58):
connection with another human being, with a person.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
In other words, even in an age of algorithms, we're
still wired for real human conversations. When we come back
from the break, we'll hear from some of the attendees
at the San Antonio Career Fair, and for those of
you on the job hunt, Chris Fitzpatrick will offer some
insider tips on how to best utilize a fair near you.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Looking for a job is lonely, endless, searching, phone calls
that go nowhere, applications that vanish into thin air. What
if you could link with dozens of local companies who
are hiring right now with just one connection. That's Express
Employment Professionals. Find us at expresspros dot com. One connection,
(06:44):
endless opportunities and no fees ever for job seekers Express
Employment Professionals expresspros dot com.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
We're back talking with Chris Fitzpatrick about the enduring effectness
of job fares in today's increasingly online job market. And
I'll confess that I never had much success with job fares.
Believe it or not, I'm incredibly shy, and so I
found the prospect of having to talk to a room
full of people really intimidating. Actually I still do so
(07:19):
my visit to San Antonio wasn't much different, but for
the sake of our show, I swallowed my nerves and
approached a table. My name is Laura.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
I'm the warehouse manager at the Selma, Texas facility.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Well brings you out here today. We're just out here
and looking for some good people. We're hiring. We're very busy.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Our facility manufactured seals for a semiconnector in a camerom environment, and.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Maybe Laura at Green Tweed Technologies just had the gift
of the gab, but it wasn't as bad as I
expected it to be. Still, our career fair guru Chris
Fitzpatrick says that social anxiety is a fairly common concern
for potential career fair attendees.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Career fairs historically probably favored more extroverted individuals who step
into a large room and see dozens or hundreds of
companies and they get excited saying I'm going to get
four job offers from today alone, and it's going to
(08:17):
be incredible, and they go in there very confident. But
for individuals who are more introverted, that could be absolutely mortifying.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
But this doesn't mean that the less gregarious among us
have to skip career fairs entirely.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
One strategy for an individual who may feel a little
bit intimidated or overwhelmed by that experience is to go
in with a plan, work out a personal roadmap, saying, Okay,
I know that there are four or five companies that
I'm prioritizing that I want to go meet, and to
(08:51):
focus on clearing one at a time.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Making an initial game plan is part of Chris's three
phase approach to making the most out of care fairs.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
There's the pre fair phase, which is all the preparation
work that anybody does prior to the moment they step
foot into the building where the career fair is being held.
That's the creation of the resume, the creation of the
LinkedIn profile, the selection of the career fair attire, mapping
(09:21):
out which organizations they want to visit. This is all
part of that prefair preparation process, and you can tell
very quickly the individuals who put a lot of effort
into their preparation, the ones who put no effort into
the preparation, and then everybody in between.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Then comes the fair itself, a world when of conversations
and handshakes.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
The actual career fair itself, the thing that you've been
building toward for this whole time, is far and away
the shortest of these three phases, because it lasts, let's say,
one to four hours, and then it's over, and your
interaction with each individual organization probably is not going to
last more than two or three minutes, especially if that
organization has a line.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
But Chris says just as important to What happens at
the fair is what you do after it.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Am I going back, Am I making a LinkedIn connection?
Am I sending a thank you email? Am I doing
more in depth research on the company, on the organization?
Am I going to apply? Let me now check to
see do I have any connections who work at that
company whom I can ask questions to. Are there alumni
(10:31):
from my university working at that company whom I can
request to connect with? So that post phase is incredibly important.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Chris is an obvious believer in the power of job fares,
but he also knows they aren't magic. Not everyone that
attends one leaves with a job. But he says, even
for the people who don't get a job offer on
the spot, they shouldn't discredit the residual effects of attending.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Because, first of all, you never know if that company
is going to need to hire you five ten years
from now, and you want to have a good reputation,
and you never know if the recruiter who was working
at that table is going to end up with another
company and remember you from that interaction in a good
way or a bad.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Way, And from the other side of the table. Career
fairs continue to hold a lot of value for employers.
There are a chance to get your business name out
there and to meet a diverse array of candidates in
one place, saving time and resources.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
So both in front of the table and behind the table,
being open minded and going in there with as few
preconceived notions as possible is key to mutual success.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Chris Fitzpatrick says that career fairs also give him an
opportunity to read the economic tea leaves.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
I went to a career fair back in two thousand
and eight during the significant economic downturn that we were
experiencing then, where seven organizations show up. Three of them
were recruiting for the United States military. And I've seen
career fairs where three hundred organizations showed up in the
(12:10):
middle of a talent war.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
And fares that cater to college students give Chris some
insights into industry trends that might be coming down the pike.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
College career fairs give me a chance to put my
finger on the pulse of early and emerging trends. So,
for example, before cybersecurity really blew up as an industry,
I started noticing more and more students were highlighting that
as being a course of interest and an area of focus.
(12:42):
Same thing with data analytics. Now with machine learning and AI.
We've been hearing more about AI specifically, I say, over
the last two years, but it really started showing up
on student resumes five six years ago.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Speaking of those college career fairs, according to a poll
by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than
half of college students attended a career fair in the
past year, and of those over forty five percent received
an interview and nearly a quarter eventually received the job offer,
which I get to say is pretty impressive. At the
(13:19):
risk of stating the obvious, job fares will not be
replacing online applications or other methods like referrals and professional connections,
but career fairs are proving to be a surprisingly valuable
and resilient piece of the job hunting puzzle.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
I absolutely think that career fairs can play a complimentary
role to an online application. I think it's important to
look at each of those different facets of the job
search as part of a symbiotic relationship.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
So if you're listening to this and thinking you should
start incorporating career fairs into your next job hunt. I'll
leave you with one last piece of advice from Chris Fitzpatrick.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Go there, try to connect as best you can with
another human being. Put your best foot forward and try
it to overthink it. If we all lead with empathy,
we end up with a much better opportunity to connect
and have a positive impact.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
And if you're lucky, Otis Spunkmeyer will be there from
the job I'm Avery Thompson.
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