recruiting boots at penn state career fair

It’s recruiting season, everyone panic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok i wasn’t being serious do not panic, having said that for most of you career fairs are the last thing on your mind because your freshmen, which is totally understandable. If you’re a sophomore  i advise you to go to as many informational sessions as possible, just to familiarize yourselfs with the people because *whispers* they are the same recruiters every year. if you go enough times they will probably remember your face, so when you do go for the career fair you are more comfortable giving your 30 second pitch.

Today was the career fair for internships/co-ops and it was massive, it was my first career fair at university even though i’m a junior, the reason why it was my first is because i’m a transfer student from Penn State Harrisburg and never had the time to come to one of these events. Anyway after the career fair i was both elated and deflated, i seemed to have a huge connection with the recruiters but had been told not to get my hopes up because it means nothing apparently.

So are career fairs that important?

According to this article career fairs are a waste of time, the author talks about the dynamics of the career fair. The corporate recruiters are not very many in proportion to the amount of students seeking employment. For the most part the article is fairly accurate in my opinion because recruiters are only human; which means that they have a very short attention span, all the resumes collected may not get to the actual people that are hiring and most importantly they all get tired after meeting so many people and standing for hours. According to the cnn article ‘when you’re tired, you’re deprived of oxygen, which is necessary for the production of chemicals, such as dopamine and adrenaline, in the prefrontal cortex.” this affects you attention span lowering it, so in reality the recruiters are no longer focusing after a certain time period.

On the flip side many people truly believe career fairs are still relevant and essential, the Forbes article highlights some key important points about the importance of  the fairs: 1) The fairs are a good place to find out information about companies that are not posted online or have been purposely omitted, for example, impromptu application deadlines that have been moved up because of the immense applications the company has acquired. 2) It puts a face to a name in the mountains of resumes that are being received. 3) It really does depend on the companies you are interested in. Smaller companies will hire from a career fair, and i even saw some of the bigger companies setting up interviews at the fair and even interviewing people there.

Either way in my opinion it is better to go for a career fair, then not to go for one; there is always a chance you might get hired.