Career Fair Tips

“You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow This opportunity comes once in a lifetime” Eminem says in his song Lose Yourself rings true when it comes to career fairs and interviews. You get one shot to make an impression so don’t miss you chance by not being prepared. Here are a few tips for to get the most out of your time at a career fair. I will post another blog on interview tips.
Tips for a successful career fair:

• Make sure your resume is up to date – most recent job experience, contact information, organizational involvement
• Make sure you have plenty of copies of your resume - It is better to have them not need them than to need them and not have them.
• Dress appropriate for the career fair – you typically can not go wrong with a suit but business casual works.
• Know your resume forwards and backwards. This may sound like a no brainer but this is important when you are selling yourself to the company so that you can direct them to points in your resume as well as you what experience you have on there so you are not talking about something that is not on the resume.
• Research the companies that you are most interested in speaking with – find your top 5-10 companies and know what they do, where they are located and what opportunities they have.
• Sell YOURSELF – employers are there to hire people but you are not the only candidate that they are going to speak with. Be able to describe your relevant experience in detail i.e.: if you have completed and internship got into detail on what you did, your role & responsibilities, role, description of the project.
• Relate the conversation back to how you fit with the company – if you are talking about classes, relate it to how it fits with the company or role you are applying for. If you are involved in organizations relate what you do back to the position you are applying for. Be on your game and fight for the job.
• Prepare questions - get some questions together that think that you need to know about the company. What opportunities are available? What locations are hiring? How are they staged for the the future?
• Budget your time – the top companies will have many people who want to speak with them so you might have to come back a couple of times to get some one on one time or just wait until they get done with the conversation.

Remember that you are not the only one coming by the booth, some companies may see literally hundreds of candidates at each career fair so you need to take advantage of the time you have to make the best impression possible.You have worked hard to get this far and it would be a shame to lost it in the final stretch because you did not take the time to prepare for the career fair.