Career Fair
Last week Temple University’s College of Engineering held it’s semiannual career fair. With over 60 companies attending and no internship lined up yet, this was the perfect opportunity for me to score an internship.
During my college career, I have attended a few career fairs and although I have not yet received any position offers, I have gained something out of every career fair. In this blog, I will be going over some advice that helped me with my career fair experiences and I will highlight some key mistakes from my previous attempts.
Stage 1: Preparation
The week leading up to the career fair, I create a list of employers that interest me. In this list, I write some information about the employer (what they do, what they value, etc.). Looking back at my previous lists, I have come to realize that I am making these lists too long. I simply did not have enough time to talk to everyone on my list. Rather than spending my time gathering information on companies I won’t have time to talk to, I focused my research on my top ten companies. By prioritizing my companies, I was able to be more thorough with my research and used that to spark more intriguing conversations with the company representatives.
Resumes give you the opportunity to summarize you and your accomplishments to employers. Since resumes serve to land you an interview, it is important to make your resume stand out. After every semester, I reflect on all my accomplishments since the start of the semester and I substitute my irrelevant experiences with my newly gained experience. Currently, my “relevant experience” section extends to two-thirds of my page. After making any adjustments, I strongly recommend getting as many people to review over the resume as possible. Before finalizing my most recent resume, I had four people look over it before I was satisfied. My last recommendation is to print the resume on resume paper instead of plain white paper. This helps recruiters distinguish your resume from the rest. Temple’s Career Center provides ten pages of resume paper per semester for any student so take advantage of that.
Stage 2: At the Career Fair
My first career fair experience was less than desirable. I arrived with a poorly written resume and no idea what to expect. I never talked to a recruiter before and didn’t know how to properly begin a conversation. It’s safe to say that I was nervous. I recall a laser alignment company asking me why I was interested in joining their organization and I responded with “I really like precision” (I wonder why they never responded to my application). To avoid another embarrassing incident like that again, I implemented several tactics.
Before talking to any of my top employers, I always find a practice company. The practice company is a company that I have no issue messing up in front of, so any of the one hundred civil engineering contractors. I use this as an opportunity to practice my pitch and get rid of any of those nervous jitters.
A wise man once said (thanks Dr. Ferrar) that there are three different types of recruiters at these career fairs: an engineer, an hr representative, and an alumni. It is important to recognize which one you are talking to because each category will be impressed by different things. You will never be able to impress an engineer by just textbook knowledge, because guess what? They have been doing this longer than you. Instead, I like to switch the conversation to talk about what they do in the company. This allows me to learn more about the company and throw in some of the research notes I gathered for bonus points. HR representatives require a unique approach. I noticed that they keep mental notes of what their company looks for. For example, if you’re talking to a company that focuses their efforts on designs, the HR representative will look for some sort of CAD skill. I normally elaborate on these skills by giving a very broad explanation on how I implemented these skills on a project. Alumni are here because they want to visit their school. I like to talk to them about new events going on in the school or I allow them to tell me about their experiences at the institution. For example, I was talking to a recruiter about the new library that is being constructed at Temple. And when I followed up, I opened my email with a comment about the library.
Lastly, it is important to keep in mind that recruiters are people too. More specifically, they are people who are looking for their new co-workers. This means that they are searching for people to have conversations with and hang out with after work. Don’t be boring. When researching a company, I discovered that they have weekly ping pong competitions. Naturally, I used this as an opportunity to break the ice with a recruiter and it segued into an interesting conversation about the company’s culture. When the recruiter responded to my email, she referenced our ping pong conversation. These weird conversations give you personality and allow the recruiters to put a face on you. So stay calm and just talk to them like you would talk to a friend.
Stage 3: Following Up
This is perhaps the most crucial, and most overlooked, step in successfully landing a position from a career fair. I am also guilty of this mistake. My sophomore year I thought I did a great job with the first two stages of the career fair. I walked out thinking that I was going to have four internships lined up but to my surprise, I got no response. My mistake was that I walked out of the career fair and I thought I was done. I knew I should follow up with the companies I talked to, but I kept pushing it off. I waited until I was done all my exams and had some down time to email the recruiters but by then it was too late. This time, I made sure that I emailed every single recruiter within 24 hours of talking to them. I also asked for the contact information for the managers at the companies and I talked to them too. If the recruiter has a LinkedIn, you bet that I found it and connected and messaged them. And surprise surprise, I finally got responses from them.
Career fairs are hard. You are competing with all your peers to obtain a limited amount of open positions. I recommend that any student, freshman or senior, attends as many career fairs as possible. Whether you get an offer or not, you will gain something out of it. I hope you got something out of this blog and I wish you the best of luck on your next career fair!
