Becoming Who You Want To Be

In addition to being a place to drop many resumes with many companies, job fairs create great opportunities to speak with company representatives. In order to master the job fair, you will need to hone your job-fair-networking skills. You will have to interact with company representatives if you want to leave your resume with them, and you will want to leave good, memorable impressions.

Job fair networking involves speaking with, getting to know, and extracting contact details from company representatives and recruiters. You need to go through this process because employers want to check that job fair attendants are good fits for the company. Whether or not you mesh with other people in the company is difficult to show on a piece of paper, so you have to pro-actively prove to the representative that you are in fact a good fit. A good place to begin is JobConcierge.com that has an extensive list of job fairs and career fairs online.

Before dropping your resume, you should try to seek out the company’s senior managers or hiring managers. Other employees are great, too, but you want the people with influence to remember that you are a great candidate for the job they’ll be making the decisions about who to hire at the end of the day.

Before you speak with any company representatives, make sure that you have prepared a statement about your background, why you are a good fit, and why you want to work of the company. This statement should be short– about thirty seconds to one minute long. It should not be memorized, as the recruiters will be able to see that you are essentially reading from a script. You need to let the representative know that you didn’t just show up to the fair to drop countless resumes with any company in a desperate attempt to catch any opportunity thrown your way. It is a good idea to practice before the fair, perhaps with a friend, responding to such questions as Can you tell me a little about yourself? Representatives have plenty of other questions to ask concerning your career plans or past work experiences, and it would be a good idea to practice those as well.

If you do your research in advance, you will also be able to let the company know how you think you can help them in their current state. If you’re aware that the company is launching new projects in China, for example, you should let them know that you are fluent in Mandarin, have worked with native Chinese in the past, and can help lead projects by being the first line of interaction with the native workforce (but only if these details are all actually true!). Again, you’re trying to make a good, memorable impression for the representatives.

Before you go to your next job fair, don’t forget to thoroughly practice, research, and prepare yourself. We recommend you review JobConcierge.com for career advice and more job fair information. This is the best way to make sure you leave a good impression with each representative at the fair. If you’re fortunate, your networking preparation (and strong resume) will result in the start of a new career.

JobConcierge offers human powered job search service – Real people search through 300 job sites and submit applications. JobConcierge job search optimization is known for its extensive career fair list