Article from rrstar.com
By Sean F. Driscoll
BUSINESSROCKFORD.COM
Posted Feb 18, 2012 @ 06:14 PM
ROCKFORD — After six hours behind a table at a recent job fair, Michael King and Katy Chadwick started sifting through the piles of resumes they’d collected.
It had been a long day, and one of mixed productivity. Although traffic had been fairly brisk at Workplace Staffing’s table, quality applicants were far outweighed by people without the right kind of experience, people who’d dropped a resume on the table with barely a word to spare, people who’d shown up in sweatpants.
They split the resumes into three piles: “yes,” “no” and “maybe.” All of the resumes would be added to the company’s personnel database, but the piles, guided by about 120 seconds of conversation, are the first filter for tracking applications and helping Workplace clients find qualified workers.
A few years ago, when the applicants were plentiful but the positions scarce, the lessons of how to work your way through an employment fair were academic: Update your resume. Dress to impress. Shake hands. Make eye contact.
Now, even the smallest difference in how an applicant handles those lessons can be the tiebreaker between candidates.
“Someone who’s dressed more professionally, who’s more outgoing, might be the candidate who gets put to the top of the pile versus the middle,” said Amanda Drinkwater, a senior technical recruiter for QPS Employment Group, another area staffing firm.
For the unemployed, job fairs can be a shopping bonanza of would-be employers, with every booth representing an opportunity. For hiring managers, they represent hundreds of conversations, each one centered on a question: Does this person have what I need?
Jan. 25, Tebala Shrine Temple
The setup: By 9:15 a.m. Wednesday, the day of a job fair sponsored by the Rockford Register Star, King is sitting alone at Workplace Staffing’s table, which was in the corner of the stage at the front of the Tebala Shrine’s 7,500-square-foot ballroom, about as far from the doors as possible. A 24-by-30-inch sign on a collapsible easel on the table is his only promotion. (At more industry-specific job fairs, King said, he’d come armed with pens and pads of paper to give away.)
King’s tooling around on his company-issued iPad, looking at the latest design for Workplace’s new website and waiting patiently for the doors to open and the flood of people to enter. Dozens already are decamped in the Tebala Shrine lobby, resumes in hand, ready to move.
The Workplace table is dwarfed by NCO Group’s setup, with three tables, an 8-foot-tall sign and piles of key chains and other swag. King gets even more buried in the visual clutter when The Workforce Connection, an umbrella organization for several federally funded job-training programs, sets up its booth on the auditorium floor, almost directly in front of his corner of the stage. Its 5-foot-tall signs go on top of its table, partially obscuring the Workplace table from view.
“I think it’s about location. You always wish you get to be on the main floor where people are walking by you,” King says, taking an annoyed survey of his surroundings. “But that’s all right.”
For staffing firms and companies, job fairs can be an effective way to find workers. King said Workplace Staffing’s results can be mixed, with more results coming from job fairs aimed at manufacturing employers than a come-one, come-all affair.
With job growth in the Rock River Valley on the rise in 18 of the past 20 months, more applicants are restarting their job searches. That’s increasing the bang-for-the-job-fair-buck for QPS, Drinkwater said.
“You can meet so many people in a day,” she said.
Today, King, a business development manager who handles most of the industrial recruiting for Workplace, will be looking for candidates for a wide variety of positions. Anyone with a CNC background would be a hot prospect, but he’s also looking for people who can drive a forklift, who know how to work on diesel engines or who can run an industrial machine. Chadwick, an employment solutions manager who handles mostly administrative positions, needs bookkeepers, administrative assistants and people with a legal background.
After a few more minutes on the iPad, King takes another look at the booth, then glances at its neighbors.
“Maybe I should make our sign bigger,” he says.
The rush: At 10 a.m. sharp, the ballroom doors open. The first wave has been waiting for more than an hour to get in; most know who they want to see first. About a dozen see behind one large sign and look next to another to find Workplace Staffing.
“What kind of job are you looking for?” King asks for the first of what would be hundreds of times in the next six hours. (Chadwick gets there at about 10:20 a.m., hauling a bushel of helium-filled balloons and some mints from Party City. The decoration calvary has arrived.)
The first ones to the table look like good prospects. They’ve got resumes, they shake hands and make good eye contact, they know which of Workplace’s jobs fit their skills. Those resumes go straight in the “yes” pile.
For some applicants, King and Chadwick go a step farther. Workplace, unlike some other companies or staffing firms, doesn’t have employment applications at the job fair. Instead, they ask most people in the “yes” pile to come into the office the next day to fill out paperwork and take a battery of pre-employment tests.
It’s another screening tool, Chadwick later explained. If they follow through, it’s a hint about their effectiveness as an employee. If they don’t, it’s not a fatal blow, but it’s not a good first step.
“To me, that’s indicative of what type of employee you’re going to be. You say you’re going to do something, and you follow through: Those are good things to see,” Chadwick said.
At 10:30 a.m., Rockford resident Jill London arrives at the Tebala Shrine looking for work. Out of a job since July, she hadn’t known about the job fair until hearing about it that morning from her boyfriend, T.J., who had, in turn, heard a radio ad while driving to work.
She only stopped at one booth. Chadwick took 120 seconds to review London’s resume and asked her to come into the office to fill out an application.
London did, that very afternoon.
Spoiler alert: Things turn out well for her.
The high-water mark: After an hour, the line at the booth is consistently three to four people deep. As the day wears on, the “maybe” and “no” piles start to make a resurgence. Some people have a good background, but nothing that precisely matches a current opening. Some may have a slim background, but show potential. Others have a bit of unrelated experience and not much more to rely on.
About 10 people into the morning, King sees the first person who breaks Rule No. 1 about coming to a job fair: he doesn’t have a resume. Others are out of date.
That’s irritating, but not the biggest thing to get under King’s skin.
“When people say they’re looking for anything, that really annoys me,” he said. “I always want to say ‘I’m looking for a brain surgeon.’”
By lunchtime, King and Chadwick have talked with dozens of people and given out directions to the Workplace as many times (“East State Street, past Alpine, next to the McDonald’s”). During an afternoon lull, King has time to pop open his laptop and fire up the company’s personnel management software to start checking his “yes” pile against the company’s database of past hires. A couple of people get bounced down from a “maybe” to a “no” after King runs them through the system and finds some prior problems, usually in the pre-employment screening process.
Of the 154 resumes they collected during the day, about a third — 52 — ended up in the “yes” pile, at least for now. It’s a higher-than-normal figure that turns out not to have much connection to subsequent hiring. About 2 in every 5 ended up a “no.”
No hiring decisions get made today. There are references to check, tests to administer and more interviews to be conducted. They’ve made it through the first hoop, but the hoops are going to get smaller and smaller from here.
“There’s nothing that’s a ‘yes’ for sure, but I’ve got some possibilities,” King says.
Jan. 26, Workplace Staffing
The trickle: The next morning, King and Chadwick are back at the office, slightly weary but ready for work. Yesterday’s resumes have been scanned into the computers; now it’s time to wait and see who shows up.
The early going is not reassuring. By midmorning, only a few people King asked to come in have shown. Of those, he’s already had to send a few back to the parking lot after they failed to make it through the company’s screening process.
Chadwick’s having more luck. London, one of her hottest prospects from the previous day, is back, has passed her pre-employment tests and will soon be en route to Columbia Pipe & Supply Co. for an interview.
The battery of testing at Workplace Staffing can include a drug screen, a criminal-background check and phone calls to listed references and recent employers. For administrative applicants like London, a round of analytical exams, tests of Microsoft Office proficiency, typing and data entry are also the norm.
Chadwick said London’s resume, which includes stints as a sales assistant for several building supply companies, caught her attention. But the reason London progressed this far is the simplest: She showed up where she said she would.
“Typically, we don’t see a lot of that,” Chadwick says of the same-day turnaround. “When we say ‘I think this could work, I want you to come down to Workplace,’ I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s not usually as quick.”
“I figured since I was already dressed up and on the way home, I’d just go ahead and pop in,” London later explained. “I think I just got really lucky and was at the right place at the right time.”
The clincher: The day she walked into the job fair, London, 33, was six months into her unemployment stint. She’d lost her job as an inventory manager and inside sales assistant when Kitzman’s Lumber and Building Materials shut down in mid-2011. She’d spent her time looking for work and, since October, doting over her new puppy, a red brindle pit bull she and her boyfriend named Santana.
London’s been working steadily since graduating from Streamwood High School in 1996. She’s not one to enjoy forced idleness. Being stuck at home was not her forte.
“I’m home by myself all day, so when (T.J.) gets home, I’m like a little puppy,”
she said. “I’m all ‘let’s talk,’ and I know he needs his space.”
After coming to the job fair Wednesday, London spent much of Thursday at Workplace doing her testing. That afternoon, she interviewed at Columbia.
Friday morning, she found out she would be starting Monday, answering the phones and providing administrative support. The pay, London said, was “a little less” than what she’d been making at Kitzman’s, but still more than unemployment.
“I had such a bad attitude about it,” London later said of the job fair. “I mean, come on, I’m not running a CNC. And here I am, two days later, and it pretty much seems like the perfect job.”
The quick hire isn’t the norm at all companies. About 75 percent of Workplace Staffing’s top job fair contacts get placed within a week of the fair; for other companies, it could be months. It always depends on the needs of the company, and their clients, when a job fair is held.
“Sometimes they’ll be a total flop, other times it’s great,” King said. “It can be maddening for the job seeker. One week they would have found a job; the other week, nothing. That’s why they have to keep showing up.”
London had the skill in her work history and her confident talk with Chadwick. She had the luck of T.J. listening to the radio at the right time. The dash of good timing came thanks to Columbia having a need in their office during the right week.
Voila.
“For being at a job fair, I don’t think there’s always a lot of ‘Hi, I’m Jill, nice to meet you,’” Chadwick said of London’s quick hire. “It’s mostly just dropping off your resume. But she had that extra effort in. Not only were her skills applicable, but she was very outgoing. She didn’t act like she was getting her teeth pulled. She was trying to sell herself.
“The typical things you hear about how to work a job fair, she did them.”
Reach staff writer Sean F. Driscoll at 815-987-1346 or sdriscoll@rrstar.com.
Article from rrstar.com