Great American Job Fair Attendance

I’ve attended a lot of job fairs in my day, but I’ve never been so taken back by the number of people who attended a job fair at this hour of the day!

I was asked by oDesk to consider manning a table a the Great American Job Fair hosted by Tory Johnson who does the work segments on  Good Morning America. This job fair was going to be held in Boston.   Here’s the catch: We had to be there at 5am and the job fair ran from 6am to 10am.  So here’s my story:

First off  I want to commend oDesk staff Josh and Elizabeth for giving us so much information up front and I also want to thank my fellow partner in crime for the day Erin.  Thank heavens there were two of us!  Actually job fairs where you are the ‘displayer’ versus the ‘job seeker’ are two different things!

I arrived at the Boston Sheraton at 4:45am to set up for the job fair. There were at least 50 tables set up for display as well as a ‘Resume Critique’ area where specialists from the area where invited to participate and review folks resumes as they came through the job fair.

From our spot (right in front of the doors) the immediate ‘neighbor’ displays were Westinghouse (yes the light bulb folks), Poland Springs, a multi level marketing company, a security company and if you can believe this we even saw a display from the Secret Service!

As one would expect in Boston, a number of the area hospitals also had tables set up with folks there to talk about job opportunities. No doubt, in this economy there are more job seekers than there are jobs to go around!

The doors to the Grand Ballroom where the job fair was being held opened at 6am – from then until 10am the traffic was very steady.  In fact, when I arrived at 4:45 there were at least 30 people who were already lined up with their resumes in hand. Go figure (even when I was looking for work full time you would NOT have found me there!).  (we even wondered if some folks skipped work or school to show up there!)

For those who don’t know much about Boston we have a large college area in Boston (and surrounding communities) and we also have a significant health care community in Boston proper (some of the leading researchers in the country come from Boston).  So I wasn’t too sure how much interest  we would see in oDesk at this job fair! I was more than pleasantly surprised.

We had a steady stream (and often 3-4 people at one time) of people approach us at the job fair, and all of them asked the same first question “What is oDesk?”. As best as we could Erin and I talked about oDesk from the providers perspective (and in a couple of cases I talked about it from the buyers perspective since I’m a buyer as well).  I think a few people thought we were off our rockers (i.e. no job site is legit) or we were just there ’selling something’.

We first had to dispel the myth that we were employees of oDesk which was pretty simple to do and then we basically discussed our own experiences on oDesk and explained what we found as benefits:

A)  Guaranteed pay on hourly work

B)  Variety of Jobs

C)  No up front costs

D)  Set your own hours

All of these things appealed to the people we talked to at the job fair once they understood what we were doing.

In all I would estimate that the bulk of people we spoke with were in fact writers (which is interesting) though we did run into a few graphic artists, IT people and others with an interest (more than passing) in the entire notion of working at home.  We even talked to a few who had been laid off from the financial services industry and were looking for other opportunities and that’s why they were at the job fair.

All in all, it was unlike any other job fair I’ve ever attended. And being on the ‘other’ side of the table instead of the one trying to get someone to look at my resume was interesting and fun!

If oDesk offers you the opportunity to represent them at one of these job fairs, consider doing so! It’s fun and you can spread the word about oDesk and how you work effectively with them!

Happy Freelancing!