Employers may think of career fairs strictly as events in which they’re invited to participate, whether by schools, trade associations or others who might organize them. As UPMC found last fall, however, an employer might have a better shot at recruiting if it instead serves as host.
A career fair that the healthcare giant hosted in early December drew more than 500 students and focused their attention solely on jobs UPMC has to fill.
“It was very successful,” said Erik Orient, UPMC’s Director of Military Affairs & Student Initiatives. “We were turning schools away.”
Hosting a career fair seemed like a no-brainer to UPMC. As the region’s largest healthcare system, “We have a lot of open jobs, so engaging with high schoolers just makes sense from a talent acquisition standpoint.”
Held at the Petersen Events Center in Oakland, the career fair benefitted from multiple factors, Orient said. Among them, UPMC gave itself enough lead time, did plenty of planning, and provided lunch. They also worked with the Consortium to identify optimal timeframes on the school calendar, recruit students and line up transportation.
Providing food and transportation were among the ways UPMC tried to “remove any barriers,” that might cause a school or student to decline an invitation, Orient said.
UPMC also worked to change things up to make the event itself an interesting and different kind of experience. Organizers hoped students would get more out of it than “a handshake from behind a table, a glossy pamphlet, and maybe some kind of SWAG,” Orient said. “That’s not very engaging and it doesn’t give any sense of what the jobs are. We told every UPMC representative who was coming, ‘You have to bring something engaging for the students to see and do’.”
Examples included a CPR-practice dummy, medical devices, and other props for hands-on interaction. Even representatives of UPMC’s Corporate Construction division made the career fair interactive, Orient said. They brought virtual reality goggles so that students could ‘walk through’ an actual job site—the new Mercy Pavilion being built near UPMC Mercy Hospital.
Teachers and students rated the career fair a huge success. In an email, one Allegheny Valley educator described it as “awesome,” said Gina Barrett, our Director of Partnerships. “At every station, they said they found something to see, do and touch. It was all hands-on.”
“We wanted everything to be engaging so that students left there feeling as if they got to actually do something,” Orient said. “We wanted to give them a sense of what people do on a daily basis, as opposed to just meeting a recruiter who says ‘UPMC is a great place to work’.”
Held at the Petersen Events Center in Oakland, the career fair benefitted from multiple factors, Orient said. Among them, UPMC gave itself enough lead time, did plenty of planning, and provided lunch. They also worked with the Consortium to identify optimal timeframes on the school calendar, recruit students and line up transportation.
Providing food and transportation were among the ways UPMC tried to “remove any barriers,” that might cause a school or student to decline an invitation, Orient said.
UPMC also worked to change things up to make the event itself an interesting and different kind of experience. Organizers hoped students would get more out of it than “a handshake from behind a table, a glossy pamphlet, and maybe some kind of SWAG,” Orient said. “That’s not very engaging and it doesn’t give any sense of what the jobs are. We told every UPMC representative who was coming, ‘You have to bring something engaging for the students to see and do’.”
Examples included a CPR-practice dummy, medical devices, and other props for hands-on interaction. Even representatives of UPMC’s Corporate Construction division made the career fair interactive, Orient said. They brought virtual reality goggles so that students could ‘walk through’ an actual job site—the new Mercy Pavilion being built near UPMC Mercy Hospital.
Teachers and students rated the career fair a huge success. In an email, one Allegheny Valley educator described it as “awesome,” said Gina Barrett, our Director of Partnerships. “At every station, they said they found something to see, do and touch. It was all hands-on.”
“We wanted everything to be engaging so that students left there feeling as if they got to actually do something,” Orient said. “We wanted to give them a sense of what people do on a daily basis, as opposed to just meeting a recruiter who says ‘UPMC is a great place to work’.”
