Hacker News Reader

Correct, except in my case and some other outliers I'm sure. My first job was due to a career fair where I talked to a very small startup, the owner was an old SGML guy, it was about a year before XML really took off and I was very into XML so I impressed him enough to get the job. If not I'm sure nobody at that fair or anywhere else would have hired me at the time.

I sort of agree, except with this exception. I use to go to Career fairs, but not for full time hires, but for paid internships. I worked at a big company, and I had complete control over who I hired as an intern. I was able to find many good intern candiates this way and some of those we hired and even converted to full time. So if you see an HR person, just drop off your resume. If you see a hiring manager it might be worth a chat.

Most employees at career fairs are wearing the same thing. Students don’t know the title of the employee until after the pair has begun talking.

> Career fairs have two purposes: For the company it's a way to establish / further their brand, and for students it's a way to get their resumes to companies and talk to employees.

Totally agree.

In my experience, skipping the career fair in favor of attending the smaller, company-specific information sessions yielded MUCH better results for my exposure.

This isn't universally true.

At my university's career fair I did multiple interview screenings on campus as the result of the career fair. One interview (with an engineer, not a recruiter) led to an internship at a major tech company which led to a full time job there.

Many of my peers had similar experiences.

Maybe for big companies but for smaller companies, it's often a member of the engineering team that mans the booth and, speaking from experience, yes, people who leave a positive impression do get additional impetus to get them in for an interview loop.

It sounds like you've been burned out by the career fair circuit -- maybe your company needs to swap in someone who is still interested in actually talking and listening to prospective hires. If you find talking to candidates "really tedious", I don't know that you're the best face for your company anymore.

A lot of company representatives do in fact remember and note especially promising hires. I'm sure that Boeing and LM and whoever just throw resumes onto the stack, but younger and more dynamic startups definitely have room for human impressions in the process.

>It sounds like you've been burned out by the career fair circuit

I've been burnt out by attending too many career fairs, and they are as he describes. Most of the people you speak to will simply take your resume and pass it on - they don't recommend any particular candidate, etc. Many companies are quite open about it. In fact, some companies will tell you not to give them your resume during the career fair. They just send you to their web site.

Just gotta know which companies to talk to at the fair. For example, line for Google at my school was always long, but very quick, because they simply took the resumes, had a 1min long convo that didnt really matter (as i was even told by people working the booth there), and that’s it. For others, it actually did matter. So you just gotta figure out which ones actually care about the career fair and which ones do not.

While i find the generalization of “big corps waste your time at career fairs, small companies actually do care” to be a good general heuristic for starting out, this is not universally true. Off the top of my head, i remember Palantir and Bloomberg specifically caring a lot about the career fair, with the former especially known for giving quick on-the-spot interviews at the career fair (note: i ended up working for neither of them, but i went through the full interview loops with both, and both can be absolutely attributed to my conversations with them at the fair).

It is difficult to know any of that the first time you attend a career fair, but by the time your last career fair rolls out, you should already have a good idea which companies are worth talking to at the fair and which ones are not (thru your own previous experiences, friends, etc).

>It sounds like you've been burned out by the career fair circuit -- maybe your company needs to swap in someone who is still interested in actually talking and listening to prospective hires. If you find talking to candidates "really tedious", I don't know that you're the best face for your company anymore.

My company does the same as OP mentioned. We do not have any power to call out good candidates, we collect all their resumes all the same, then a recruiter reaches out.

Like OP above, I have no problem speaking about my own experiences, or answering any questions you may have. But trying to impress me by listing the projects you've done isn't helping either of us accomplish our goals.

I think anyone finds talking about irrelevant topics tedious.

Please don't put words in my mouth. I wrote very explicitly that I am happy to share my experiences with students. What I do find tedious is students acting all chirpy and droning on and on about this project and that project, and articles like these further encourage that behavior.

For a company, especially one with brand recognition, a career fair is not a very good avenue for talent scouting. You get very little facetime with students, have to talk to a hundred of them in a couple of hours, and they are all telling you some small variation of the same thing, because well they did all these courses together and they all had to do the same projects and yadda yadda.

I am making these points to increase the chances that a career fair is an efficient use of my time and the student's time.