David Friedman wrote a post, How We Used To Get Jobs [via], about how he got a job from the classifieds section of the NY Times in 2000.
This story reminds me of how I got my first real programming job that same year, but instead of the classifieds section of the NY Times, I found my first job at a job fair at the Minneapolis Convention Center. I don't remember the exact time line but it was either after graduation or close to graduation when my roommate invited me to go to a job fair he had heard about. I had really no experience, so my resume was a lot of fluff with little actual substance. But armed with this piece of paper, my roommate and I headed to a job fair. I dropped off a lot of resumes that day, but I specifically remember talking with an HR rep from Wells Fargo. We talked about Wells Fargo, me and some job details. I dropped my resume and went off having no idea if they would ever contact me.
Up until that point I had sent thousands of resumes via email and gotten nothing back. Even in 2000 it was hard for entry-level candidates, junior engineers of today, to get a foot in the door. How do you get a job with no experience? How do you get experience without a job? The saying was true then and is true today. I was beginning to give up hope and starting to look at alternatives - the Army didn't sound so bad. More school, perhaps?
I would spend the weekends emailing out resumes then anxiously run home after class to check my answering machine to see if anyone had called to invite me in for an interview. Nobody from my email sending ever did. But eventually I got a call from Wells Fargo - the recruiter I met at the job fair, asking me to come in for an interview. I went to the interview and eventually got the job.
Programmer Analyst 1 with a starting salary of $29,000 a year. That job fair changed everything for me and my career going forward. It got me right in front of the person doing the hiring, and they were able to put a face to the name when they went back to look over the resumes. That seems to have worked better than a thousand emails.
I talked to others who were in the same computer programming program back then who never landed a software job. I'm very lucky to have gone to this job fair with my roommate. I often wonder what would have happened, or how my career would have turned out, had I not gone to that job fair.
I don't hear much about job fairs anymore. And I do wonder if they're a better way to attract talent today. With email being flooded with applicants from around the world, would job fairs targeting local tech talent be less of a burden for hiring managers and give qualified candidates a better shot? I feel like we all would benefit from being able to engage with the local community rather than sifting through 6,000 resumes from all over the world.