Jobs Fairs: Does This Annoy You Too?

Truegho

Whenever I have visited most jobs fairs, I have invariably come away feeling extremely disappointed, and have even felt angry that my hopes had been built up by this shallow promise of "hundreds of jobs."

All you seem to get when you visit these job fairs is either stands with college enrolment offers, stands with useless employment agencies, but hardly any offering REAL jobs from REAL firms.

Does this annoy you too?

Gingernutty

Oooooooooh yeah!

The jobs fairs around my way are classic. There are a number of 'potential employers' who hand out application forms which are effectively 'speculative', so that if there's a relatively low level job going in the future, they might consider looking at the submitted applications.

Either that or there are a series of temporary and/or part time seasonal roles (Christmas was deadly for that) which once you had gone to the fair to find out about you were told to look at the websites and apply online.

A4E, Connexions, JobCentrePlus and the local colleges tend to be represented but, you're right, no actual jobs.

However, when I was redundant (Sept 09 - Feb 10), going to the fair earned me a few brownie points with my Advisor at the Job Centre.

Truegho

I share great empathy with you here. I honestly don't know why they bother with these, quite often useless, job fairs.

Gingernutty wrote: »

Oooooooooh yeah!

The jobs fairs around my way are classic. There are a number of 'potential employers' who hand out application forms which are effectively 'speculative', so that if there's a relatively low level job going in the future, they might consider looking at the submitted applications.

Either that or there are a series of temporary and/or part time seasonal roles (Christmas was deadly for that) which once you had gone to the fair to find out about you were told to look at the websites and apply online.

A4E, Connexions, JobCentrePlus and the local colleges tend to be represented but, you're right, no actual jobs.

However, when I was redundant (Sept 09 - Feb 10), going to the fair earned me a few brownie points with my Advisor at the Job Centre.

heretolearn_2

I always thought of job fairs more as a career fair - the chance to go and learn about different types of jobs and employers. They are not really places to go and find a job right now.

Truegho

I know, it's ridiculous. Don't know why they bother having them at all.

heretolearn wrote: »

I always thought of job fairs more as a career fair - the chance to go and learn about different types of jobs and employers. They are not really places to go and find a job right now.

Strider590

Agencies wasting peoples time with non-existent jobs, JUST so they can fill their books....... They should be shot, quite frankly.

saintjammyswine

I work for a college and attend these on the stands and can assure you it is not only the visitors that get frustrated, we do too!!!!

Truegho

Talking of agencies, I have had more than my fair share of them. The last one, a local one, was the WORST I have ever encountered. They had me spending an hour in the jobcentre filling in a ridiculously long app form for the 100 call centre jobs they purported to have. Then they kept me waiting weeks and weeks, with no word to start work. When I queried the delay over the phone, I was either fobbed off or - worse - ignored. Complaints to the Area Manager didn't even cut any ice.

Finally, to top it all - and to exacerbate my anger all the more - after all this waiting, they had the audacity to then turn around and say that I had been "unsuccessful." It was like a kick in the stomach!

You know, if I repeated a word to adequately describe exactly what I think of this agency, the air would be blue!

Strider590 wrote: »

Agencies wasting peoples time with non-existent jobs, JUST so they can fill their books....... They should be shot, quite frankly.

Saturnalia

Yes, been to a few and found them useless for all the reasons everyone else has already stated.

ferien_uk2011

I've got a couple of jobs from job fairs. One was a Christmas temp job in a shop. I filled in the application form at the job fair then got called for an interview later on. Second was in a coffee shop that was hiring for a number of different stores - this was in Toronto though where they have one of these stores on every corner so they had a lot of vacancies to fill.

However, I've been to graduate fairs and never had any luck.

Deep_In_Debt

I went to a few when I got made redundant a few years ago...the only good thing about them was the freebies I got so I made sure I took a big bag with me every time!