Spotlight for Career Services Professionals

How do you decide which organization goes where when you map out your career fairs? NACE Community members offered several suggestions for how they handle career fair mapping:

• Put major employers—those that students are drawn to—in the corners or at the end of a line of booths so that traffic flow doesn’t get clogged.
• Spread the competition around. Don’t place competing industries or grad schools next to each other.
• Group employers by putting those with the greatest need for new hires together.
• Spread the big employers out among the booths so that students must walk through the entire career fair.
• Create industry clusters within the career fair. Employers can choose which cluster they want to belong to. At one school, those clusters include professional and business services; agriculture and manufacturing; consumer goods and logistic; water, energy, and technology; creative arts and media; education and research; healthcare and human services; and government and public service.
• Simply place organizations alphabetically.

NACE Community members also provided tips for helping students and employers connect during career fairs:

• Create a master sheet for students that showcases the type of positions an employer is hiring for. For example, a big-box retailer may be looking for paralegals as well as IT majors.
• Create stickers to help employers and students find each other. Employers display the stickers for the majors they are hiring, and students wear a sticker that identifies their major.

Do you have tips to share? Join the discussion in the NACE Community.