When you go to a career fair, you’ll bring your resume (also known as a CV), which will not have mistakes, be comprehensible and emphasize your attributes. Even though this sounds like the typical resume, you’ll need to think about more advanced job fair strategy beyond that.
Quite obviously, you should make plenty of copies of your resume to distribute to the many employers at the career fair’s stands. There’s no point in attending a career fair if you don’t have enough resumes to go around. The exact number will depend on the number of companies attending the event, which you can normally find through the job fair’s marketing material. If you can’t get your hands on a company list, 25 is typically a good number for most middle-size fairs, while 40 is generally a good number for larger fairs.
Another important job fair advice is to make sure your resume is clear, concise and not over two pages. There will be large crowds of people at the career fair, and you may be one of hundreds of attendants. Employers will only scan your resume to see if you fit what they are looking for. There simply is no time at career fairs for wordy resumes filled with unnecessary details.
Even more importantly is to tailor your career fair resume to specific companies. From experience, job fairs publish company names prior to the event. Be sure to do your due diligence in seeing which companies you want to meet and in what order. JobConcierge.com has one of the best career fair and networking events list on the internet and we recommend the page as a starting point. JobConcierge covers more than 300 job fairs and networking events across the United States. After your diligence, tailor your resume to the individual company. Applying for marketing companies? Then emphasize previous marketing skills, no matter how long ago. Consulting? Then add bullets on your consulting experience to your job fair resume.
Of course, you also want to carry some generic career fair resumes that can be distributed to any “second-tier” companies in attendance. You may not have time to drop resumes at every single booth there, but after you’ve exhausted your first-choice companies (which you’ll have thoroughly researched and prepared custom resumes for), you may want to give the other companies a shot.
JobConcierge offers human powered job search service- Real people search 300 job sites and submit applications. JobConcierge job search optimization is also known for its extensive networking event list
