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February 9, 2011 5:16 PM

Help me use a college career fair to my best advantage!

I work full time as a research assistant for a university, and also take graduate classes part time. I'd like to start a job search. The university will hold a career fair soon. Sounds like a good opportunity.

I don't really know what kinds of positions my skills qualify me for. (See here for my skills.) I do know that I am not an engineering student. I am not a computer science student. I am not a biologist, chemist, or physicist. That covers many of the positions on offer at the fair. Nontechnical positions sound vague and opaque to me. "Implementation consultant"? I want someone to explain to me what's available before I can want it.

I visited the career center twice to get a sense of direction. Both times I started by asking: what jobs do my existing skills qualify me for? how do I develop a list of employers that are hiring for these positions? My hope was that the counselors would help me discover potential good fits with employers I have overlooked.

Both counselors deflected my direct questions and launched into scripts I've heard before from other career counselors (i.e., at my alma mater). One focused on my undergraduate second major in anthropology (which I haven't done anything with since graduating) and told me the old chestnut about a humanities degree qualifying me for any job I want and "writing my own job description." The other offered resume formatting advice and introduced me to such insider resources as the Washington Post jobs section and Idealist.org. She also suggested that I look into "consulting firms and think tanks," but had a hard time suggesting resources for making a list of these. Also, that's a very vague suggestion.

Both counselors struck me as well-meaning but clueless. They seemed to know little about specific career fields or area employers. Also, both of them discouraged me from visiting the fair, explaining that employers will mostly expect undergraduate applicants from specific majors. This statement surprised me a lot.

tl;dr:

• How do I approach a career fair when I have a hard time pitching my training and experience to employers?
• How do I approach a career fair when I'm not a typical graduating senior in a traditional technical discipline?
• Is there anything I can say or ask for at the university career center to develop a better sense of how my existing skills map onto actual jobs?
• Where else can I find a professional mentor who can answer the questions I have?

Thanks for suggestions.

posted by Nomyte to work & money (5 answers total)

I can (maybe) help with the first two, probably not at all with the second two.

Start by asking them questions. What types of jobs are you hiring for? Who are you looking for? If something sounds remotely interesting, ask what that entails a bit more. Have a conversation with the people. Give them a resume, talk about some things you've really enjoyed doing in the past and about some things you' want to do in the future.

You are probably talking to a recruiter not someone who is actually in charge of hiring, these are the people in charge of getting you in the door and in front of hiring managers. This means they need to remember you so you need to make an impression, a good impression. They are going to be looking at resumes that all look alike and undergrads that all run together into one person. By not being one of these typical graduating seniors that is a start but your personality is really going to be the most important here.

If they like you they are more likely to bring you up for some other job that comes up that isn't one of the ones they went to the career fair to recruit for. I definitely hired a couple people who weren't traditional students that I met at career fairs. Give the recruiter a reason to go to bat for you and they will, they like doing this stuff.
posted by magnetsphere at 5:44 PM on February 9, 2011

Caveat: I haven't done this. Basic advice would be: have a clear pitch about yourself, and have done a little homework on the types of jobs that might be on offer by these employers.

Hone an elevator pitch (a 30 sec - 1 min speech) about your skills. Research, test development, knowledge of linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology. Synthesizing information from diverse sources, analyzing, quantitative skills, presentation skills, people skills, etc.

Then find a list of who will be at the career fair. What do they do? General "consultant" stuff you probably can do. Highly specialized software stuff, maybe not. Intelligence? Defense contractors? Finance? Do you want to try those? Can you figure out what they do, and try to make your elevator pitch fit those needs.

Write up a basic resume of one page, highlighting your skills, and print up several copies, maybe 10?

Write up a list of questions to ask - where are your operations based? what kind of work would I be doing for you, day-to-day, in my first year? what growth potential is there? what are the skills your organization most wants new employees to have? etc.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:30 PM on February 9, 2011

LobsterMitten: Thank you for your answer. I have the list of employers in front of me. I also have the list of areas each one if hiring for. I have a detailed resume and a non-specific elevator speech about what I do: "I love to tell stories using numbers. For the past three years, I have been collecting and helping analyze human data in a project-based setting. I've also helped document findings in technical reports and delivered conference presentations about them. My academic background blah blah blah…"

The problem is that it's very generic, and it places the burden of fitting me to a job description on the employer. That's a losing proposition. I should be telling them why I'm right for the job. A finance or accounting major can go to a finance consulting firm and ask about finance consulting jobs. I can only describe my general "analytic skills" and insist that they somehow qualify me to work for them. Unless an employer has some sort of strange yen for linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, saying those words will not make the recruiter's job any easier.
posted by Nomyte at 8:06 PM on February 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Having just gone to a handful of university career fairs to recruit for jobs that don't fit into a standard slot, selling yourself as a technically proficient and smart person looking for a change is exactly the right road here. Play up the stats background, and if you have any massive data background, really play that up. If you try to slot yourself into something else, you're going to get hammered pretty quickly. Play up that you're used to working on a team, but that you're able to get things done independently.
posted by devilsbrigade at 8:30 PM on February 9, 2011

I'm not HR, I'm an engineer, but I've represented my (small) company several times at career fairs. Here is my advice:

(1) Please don't walk up, hand a recruiter your resume, and say "so what jobs do you have for someone like me?" I'm here at this career fair as a favor to *you*, offering *you* employment opportunities. I'm going to go back to the office with a huge stack of resumes of which I probably only care about three. Those three are probably from people who told me what they thought they could do for me, not the people who made me do all the work to figure out where they might fit in.

(2) That said, that doesn't mean you have to have a 100% idea of what you might do for any particular company. I LOVE answering questions about my company. If a business student comes up to start asking about my company's strategies, structure, who we do business with, etc, THEN says "Oh, well, I have some experience/interest in [X]. Are you looking for people to work on that?" then I'll be very amenable to trying to figure out where you would fit in, because you've given me a starting point.

(3) In order to successfully do (2), you need to do some research on the companies you're interested in on that list and be able to ask the smart questions. I react very differently to the question "What does your company do?" than to "I know you guys work on [x], can you explain how engineers like me are involved on those projects?"

Though the career fairs I go to are usually undergrad-focused, it is almost always a pleasant surprise to find a research or lab assistant who comes by with a resume.
posted by olinerd at 4:55 AM on February 10, 2011 [1 favorite]