The State of Career Fairs in 2020

Introduction:
There are several articles online explaining the basic to-dos at a virtual career fair (vCF) in the midst of a global pandemic. Those articles will help a job seeker prepare for a vCF. This article will help a job seeker vicariously gain a vCF practice-run experience (not connections of course) and will provide future vCF organizers with suggestions on designing better experiences hopefully. Even though this article will highlight certain flaws in vCF designs and plans, the efforts of the organizers and support teams in setting up and maintaining these tools are commendable.

vCF #0 | Before ever having attended a vCF:
I was actually hoping it would be better than an in-person Career Fair because of the following reasons:
- No printing lots of resumes
- No standing in queues for check-ins and bag-checks
- Easy attendance recording at booths, without scanning QR codes or copying links from flyers
- No accidental “you too!-s” to recruiters when they say “good luck for your job hunt” (Believe me, I’ve done that twice)
- No pants!

Within an hour or two of the vCF, it was clear that the server loads were extreme and the interface stopped displaying potential wait times and how long the queue at a booth was. I had joined an organization’s booth at 10:30 AM and was still waiting to speak to them at 2:00 PM! I called the Career Services at my university and learned that I wasn’t alone. Students from certain other universities also struggled to get into two or more chats after waiting in queues for over four hours. Lastly, when the hours of waiting had worn me down, there came a point when I had to excuse myself to go to the restroom. I had no choice but to ask a flatmate to sit at my desk and fill in for me, should a recruiter pick me for a conversation. I instructed her to paste in my elevator pitch prompts from a script that I had prepared for this text-chat based career fair! I believe it is part ridiculous and part hilarious that the pandemic gave rise to situations like this and the toilet paper shortage!

Furthermore, a minor pet-peeve that I had with the Brazen vCF was that the notification audios for random announcements and a recruiter’s message sounded the same (and really made me anxious for a few seconds until I learned that a certain organization’s booth was temporarily shutting down)

A trial vGHC20 conducted just a week(end) before the main event failed, and thus the vGHC20 was postponed. This disheartened so many, who had been looking forward to attending and preparing for weeks or months! While there were rumors of it being conducted on Social27, how the organizers were planning to actually carry it out is a mystery to me. Those asking for refund petitions or lawsuits also do have a point. After all, the organizers knew of COVID-19 for months and had the resources (the tech muscle, and even funds from registrations and sponsors) to step up and deliver a satisfactory experience to all the stakeholders involved. The reduced vCF and upgrades to the full Conference could obviously not satisfy those desperately looking for employment, and additionally aggravated the all-access members of the conference who had paid full price ($799) to attend the vGHC20.

vCF #N? | Thoughts for future career fairs:
Ever since attending my vCF#1 via Brazen, I have been thinking about how vCFs could be better. It could be a possibility in the future that career fairs are purely virtual with no in-person interactions, especially if the workforces work-from-home. Having been a student of Data Structures and Algorithms, I was thinking if there could be better algorithmic ways to conduct vCFs.

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