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Check your dignity at the door, folks! Today we’re going to talk about job fairs! Now, as you all know, hunting for a job is not an easy thing, even in today’s "flourishing" job market. Most of us are all to familiar with the drill of sending out freshly polished resumes en masse and waiting by the phone for calls that will never come. It’s never pleasant to be rejected, even in this most passive way.
But if there’s one thing worse than flipping through endless inky pages of want ads in the newspaper, it’s being desperate enough to actually look at the big JOB FAIR ad that’s always in the bottom corner long enough to really learn when and where to go.
Okay, so you’ve decided you’re going to go to the job fair, get all dressed up, hand out some resumes, and talk to some potential employers face to face. You’ll be sure to make a good impression that way! They’ll remember your big smile and strong handshake, right? Wrong.
First of all let’s discuss the location. They always hold these job fairs in big open areas like gyms or cafeterias, often in schools or big warehouse buildings. It makes you feel like you’re some kind of kid again, going to the big meeting in the gym. Oh boy! As soon as you walk into the door, you go up to the counter set up at the front, always manned by "friendly, smiling people". These friendly people are usually gone on their cigarette break about the time I show up, so I grab my own damn nametag and pamphlet (featuring the complicated labyrinthine booth setup). It’s always important to resist the temptation to write a silly name like "Jack Mehof" on the tag instead of your own. While I would hire someone with such a clever tag on the spot, most interviewers aren’t going to find it funny.
Next thing you do is enter the big room, where you are welcomed with the image of desperate job hunters milling around like cattle in the slaughterhouse, all trying to show off how much more prime and tasty their rump is over all the other cows. You may faint at this point, from the wafting stench of poo hovering over the room from all the brown-nosing going on. But trudge on, brave soldiers! More humiliation awaits!
As you wander into the room, you will be greeted by booths bearing banners for such wonderful places of employment as 7-11, the US Army, and some technical firm that you don’t even BEGIN to have the qualifications for. But absolutely nothing worthwhile or interesting! I’m convinced that they hide those in the secret underground job fair that they only let the right "cool" people into. The bastards.
After milling about in the shadow of overwhelming disappointment for a while, you may actually decide to approach one of the booths, where you will most likely be completely ignored, while the two company representatives are busy chatting with each other over various inanities. After you finally get their attention, you ask them what they’re looking for. "Well, what do you DO?" they always ask. "I don’t fucking know. What do YOU do?" This response, though my own choice, is not the proper one. You must kiss ass and grovel before them and lick the shit off their boots in order to get them to show any interest. It helps to wear a big hump on your shoulder, walk with a limp and say "master" a lot as well.
After several moments of boring conversation and fake grimacing smiles, the dull glassy look behind their eyes will betray their disinterest, and they’ll tell you that they’ll take your resume into consideration. At this point there are two options. They’ll either throw your resume onto the HUGE leaning stack sitting on top of their table, or they’ll just "hang on to it" (meaning you don’t see a stack anywhere), which simply means that they’ll laugh at you and throw it away as soon as you leave. Or maybe one of them will wipe their ass with it.
Typical
recruiters at a job fair.
And you get to walk out of the building with most of your resumes still in hand, knowing damn full well that most of the ones you DID manage to give out are either already destroyed or long forgotten. But buck up, campers! There will always be more no-call-back opportunities in the paper tomorrow!
note:
-RoG- never received an application from Protoclown to
work here on I-Mockery. Protoclown just kind of showed up on our
doorstep and wouldn't go away. We just feed him table scraps and it
seems to keep him happy.
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