Job Fair: Trend or Torture?

Trends What do you get when you put a bunch of companies together in a hall and invite a couple of universities to fill in forms and allow them space to ask each other questions? Some event organizers might actually call that a ‘job fair’.  It’s no secret that over the last several years, there have been a lot of fairs where you get the blaring music and people having to shout at one another in their attempt to communicate. Well, that, coupled with the horridly bored faces of companies that have just don’t want to be there, and everyone leaves the fair wondering why they invested their time into something that yielded nothing in return.

But here’s the thing: companies want to invest; people want to attend. Companies can’t find the right people for the jobs they have, and people can’t seem to find the jobs. So why can’t a job fair work? PASHA kicked off their Job Fair expo series a few years ago, and recently revised them to be Career Expos; Rozee.pk did their fair; PnG, Jang Group and a few others managed their fairs pretty alright.

But the bottom line is this – you need these expos. A small print beneath the bottom line also says, “Proceed with caution and make sure it works.” Give the right content, the workshops, the real knowledge transfer, the professional atmosphere for people to talk and get to know one another and there is no reason why this shouldn’t work.

According to Jehan Ara, President of PASHA, “It has taken us a while to figure out what the gaps were in the system. We always got a great response from the jobseekers and the companies but we needed to tweak our events to better serve the void. I think we’re much closer to where we need to be in terms of providing the platform that benefits all stakeholders in the picture.”

Speaking to a lot of gurus on the subject, it seems to make better sense, for the Pakistani market, if the Job Fair is focused and caters to specific verticals in terms of the exhibiting companies. While you need the focus in the demand space, you do need to make sure that you reach out beyond the traditional career universities to attract the kind of HR you want. After all, you don’t have to be a geek to be a successful techie!