SUBRAMANIAN: Career fairs are pointless — there are better ways to secure careers, internships
Column: Whadda I Know
On September 15 and September 16, Rutgers University—New Brunswick hosted its Fall Career and Internship Mega Fair. This two-day event brought hundreds of companies to Jersey Mike’s Arena on Livingston campus and gave students the opportunity to chat to recruiters and see what companies were hiring. This would be the logical first step in getting a job or an internship, allowing students to become well-functioning adults in society, right?
Wrong. Simply put, career fairs are relics of an old institution that refuses to die, and there are many reasons why scrapping job fairs entirely would be beneficial.
The biggest reason for scrapping career fairs is that they do not actually get people hired. Career fairs and or job fairs do not even crack the top 13 most effective recruiting sources, according to Jobvite’s 2019 report on recruiting. What this means is that if you are going to a career fair with a freshly printed copy of your resume and handing them out to recruiters, you might as well be wasting your time and your printer money.
Building on top of the previous point, in 2009, the consultancy group Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. asked human resource executives to rank different ways of finding a job on a scale of one to five, with one being the lowest and five being the highest.
The results found that career fairs ranked the lowest, scoring a measly 1.6 out of 5. What makes this even worse is that the human resource executives ranked newspaper ads as being more effective than career fairs. If a tool used in the 19th Century is deemed more effective, that sends a clear message that something needs to change.
Not that talking to recruiters actually does anything. The same report said that “while job seekers do get to interact with a representative of the company at the job fair, it hardly qualifies as networking. The employer representative is rarely a decision maker and simply there to administer and collect applications.”
Even at the Rutgers Fall Career and Internship Mega Fair, many of the recruiters often gave generic answers that I could have probably found had I looked up the role online and asked me to fill out their interest form to stay up to date with potential openings. What this means is that the hour and 5 minutes you spent at a table probably did not improve your chances of getting an internship or job. It was likely a waste of your time. Sorry.
Further creating a mismatch between prospective employees and employers is the availability of options present. During the second day of the Fall Career and Internship Mega Fair, I saw many booths for STEM majors and for finance students. This, though, left out many students who did not necessarily fit either category.
Not to mention, other groups were excluded from the opportunities offered at the Rutgers Fall Career and Internship Mega Fair. For example, when I was waiting in line to speak to the U.S. Bank representative I was chatting with a first-year student planning on majoring in finance. While waiting in line, he was explaining to me how many of the companies there turned him down on account of him not being a junior or senior.
When we finally got to talk to the U.S. Bank recruiter, she heard that he was a first-year student and just let him down gently. Given how much time he spent waiting in line, it is a shame that all of that went to hearing that they were not looking for someone like him.
Not only was the career fair bad for freshmen, alumni also did not fare well. In a now-deleted Reddit post on r/rutgers, an attendee claimed that many of the places were not friendly to the alumni and suggested that they were only looking for current students.
The user also accused one recruiter of laughing in their face due to their grades. Given that many of these students are sacrificing time out of their day to attend this event in hopes of making their college education pay off in terms of getting employment or an internship, witnessing such disrespect is inexcusable.
Even though Rutgers means well in providing students an opportunity to get an internship or job, the fact is that career fairs are a thing of the past. From the complete ineffectiveness to the mismatch between companies and students, it is clear that holding these career fairs are simply a waste of time and money. For those that are still looking for internships, there are better ways to get them than through a booth in the middle of a basketball court.
One of the best ways to do so is to leverage your network. Whether that be friends, family and/or professors, these people are going to be far better equipped to get you an entry into the industry that you are interested in. Furthermore, going to a company's site and looking for jobs and internships directly is probably going to provide you with just as much information as going to a career fair all at the click of a trackpad. But hey, whadda I know?
Kiran Subramanian is a junior in the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in economics and political science. His column, "Whadda I Know," runs on alternate Tuesdays.
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