Shyamal Majumdar: 'Discription' of a job fair

THE HUMAN FACTOR

If you are an HR professional and could not make it to the "Big Leap Jumbo Job Fair" at Pragati Maidan that concluded on Tuesday, make sure you visit the next one.

Apart from the atmosphere and the feel of the place (30,000 youngsters jostling for your attention), the fair would have given you valuable lessons on how ill-equipped companies are to capture the mind space of job aspirants.

Barring GE, Wipro Spectramind, Birlasoft and Aviva, it seemed recruiters at the fair did not care what job aspirants were looking for. Random encounters with clueless company representatives who had no time to talk were largely a waste of time. Draping it with the banner of a job fair did not help.

The first stall at Hall number 7, the venue of the job fair, set the tone. Huge posters plastered all over the stall read: "Female required."

"For what?" asked the anxious parents of an amused 20-something lady. The overworked front desk staff shot back: "Why don't you read it carefully?" The tiny letters said "HR executives with two year's experience." Persistent queries on the minimum qualifications for the job were met with the same response: just fill in your resume and put it in the drop box.

Another job on offer at the same stall was that of computer operators. The poster said "Job discription (sic): mantenance (sic) of computers." A young job seeker from Rohtak muttered to his friend: " Yaar, you don't need to know English for this job."

At another stall where a harassed staffer was trying her best to stop the stacks and stacks of resumes from spilling out of a tiny cardboard box, a young boy asked what kind of openings were available.

The answer from the company representative left him puzzled: just say "opportunities". The boy said something that sounded like "oops!" The verdict was delivered on the spot: "you are disqualified, man." The job was that of a call centre officer but no one had the patience or time to tell him that.

At yet another stall, an executive kept saying "good communication skills required." For what kind of job? No answer. A job hunter tried to find a way out by claiming he indeed had "good skills."

The word "skill" must have rung a bell as the answer came fast: "Drop your resume." Since no drop box was visible anywhere and the executive was too busy with his monologue, the resume was "dropped" on his lap.

If attendance is the main parameter of success, the Jumbo job fair was surely a runaway hit. With 30 companies offering jobs in the BPO industry and another dozen from the IT world (over 35 educational institutes also shared the platform) all under one roof, the crowds were thick. And according to the organisers, the attendance crossed 50,000 on Sunday.

GE and Wipro Spectramind's stalls were the best organised. There were four counters and the journey to a low-end call centre job started from the first counter. Only those who could reach the fourth counter after brief screening procedures in the first three were assured of a meeting with the company's HR bosses later.

Countless HR experts will tell you despite the obvious problems, job fairs like these have enormous benefits: first, these are walk-in interviews with a difference "" you get to walk into a whole lot of companies and opportunities. This is far more than what an anonymous job application can do.

No doubt, for the corporate recruiter, job fairs offer an opportunity to reach the highest possible number of prospects in the shortest possible amount of time. For applicants, they provide an opportunity to meet a large number of hiring employers.

One top HR executive who attended the fair explains the impatience of the company executives with job aspirants by saying that the fair delivered a daunting number of candidates inexpensively but they were low-quality contacts.

"Meeting such a large number of people whose standards are no better than college drop-outs can make you dizzy," he says. In any case, he says, job fairs serve more as an information-sharing activity than a recruiting activity.

To be fair, the organisers did a good job in providing a platform for job hunters to meet employers in advance and gather up all their slick glossies on what they think makes them the best employer in the world. It's the companies themselves that should take the blame for not being able to take advantage of the event.

The overwhelming feeling one got after attending the fair is companies must plan what they want from a job fair. It is obvious that the actual hiring managers will not have the time to attend job fairs. But companies can surely do better than engaging only greenhorn HR staffers.