Of monsters and job fairs...

Honestly, you would think with all the unemployed people in this world, the folks who set up and run job fairs should be aware of the diverse crop of job applicants that could potentially show up at one of their little shindigs...

So of course I was not surprised today when I showed up at the Monster.com "Keep America Working" Job Fair and not really anything there was geared toward someone like me. As usual, I tried to do the diligent thing; I signed up online, I printed out like 30 copies of my resume and a bunch of work samples (which is standard in the media biz) and I dressed super nice. I figure any excuse to wear my new suit, the better. I need to get my money's worth, right? LOL

All the preparation, even a little anxiety and what do I get? A whopping 12 booths.

12.

Booths.

And even better, at least seven of them had to do with sales of some sort (insurance, copiers, software). My favorite was the lady who basically rambled about how they want to hire folks to do corporate copier sales, then asked, "Do you have any experience in that?" Of course my answer, "No, my background is in the media/communications business."

This is no lie; seriously that lady looked me straight in the eye and said, "OK, thank you!" No "OK well there could be some openings in our marketing department soon, so I'll take your resume..." and not "I'm not sure what we might have open right now in your area, but you can go to our site and check back..." It was like she said, "Stop standing in front of me, you're blocking the people who I REALLY need to talk with."

I mean, not that I really want to do sales, but come on... she did everything but stick her foot out and kick me from in front of her booth. I walked around a few times, chatted with more people who weren't hiring for anything remotely related to what I do and left. And to be honest, I am perfectly willing to learn new things if that's what it comes to. But apparently that's not an option these days. You either know what they want, or they don't even want to talk to you.

And I expected to see a slew of people there hunting. If I took a rough count, it MIGHT have been 100 when I showed up. After going to a TVA job fair with my mom (she works for TVA in Chattanooga) just a few days after I got laid off, I knew times were tough. That wasn't even a fair to hire new folks; just to let you talk about the all different jobs TVA offers. There had to be 3,000 people there. And there were ALL kinds: the suits, the dresses and even the occasional pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

One guy at the job fair today had on shorts, a golf shirt and was sitting at a table staring mindlessly into a pamphlet while rocking back and forth. Apparently unemployment leads to the onset of Alzheimer's... so I've got that going for me...

But I feel good about where I'm at. I honestly can't stand those environments, because I never know what to say. What can you really learn about someone by chatting for a couple minutes? I know my phone will start ringing sooner or later.