Job Fair Attracts Employers, Prospective Employees

They started lining up early outside the ballroom in the Crowne Plaza, dozens of hungry job hunters eager to meet with representatives of some 40 Connecticut companies who took part in the Middlesex County Career Fair in Cromwell on Tuesday.

“I’ve been out of work for seven months,” said Maria Gregory, an unemployed administrative assistant from Branford who was among some of the early arrivals to the job fair Tuesday morning. She said she’s trying to get another job as an office manager or administrative assistant. Like other job hunters at the fair, she said the job market right now is a competitive one and she’s been trying various tactics, including taking a networking class, to get a leg up on the competition.

“I’ve never not worked before,” she said.

The job fair was co-sponsored by the Connecticut Department of Labor, the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce and the Workforce Alliance Investment Board and attracted hundreds of job seekers from across the state.

With a recent jobs report indicating that only 54,000 jobs were added in the U.S. in May, well below what analysts had expected and the worst jobs report in eight months, it’s little wonder that such job fairs attract so many jobseekers, labor officials said.  The last job fair hosted by the agency was attended by some 800 people seeking work, said Muhammodu Giwa, a labor official who helped organize the event.

But it begs the question: With so many unemployed people out there, why do companies waste time, money and resources taking part in a job fair?

“We would like to meet with, in person, as many people as possible,” said Theresa V. Gallace, human resources manager for NAPA Connecticut. The company has more than a dozen job openings at its various locations across Connecticut and was hoping to fill some of them during the job fair.

Like other employers who attended, Gallace said meeting directly with applicants is important when human resource officials are culling through applications. Her office, she said, currently has about 2,500 job applications. Attending the job fair, she said, is also a good way for NAPA to let prospective applicants know about the company’s many locations around the state, which include a regional warehouse facility in Middletown.

“We like to get our name out there and let people know we’re hiring,” she said.

Some of the positions the company is seeking to fill, she said, include both full and part time jobs in counter sales, delivery, warehouse associate and assistant store manager.

For Matthew Ciak, a recruiter for MTU Aero Engines, which has offices in Rocky Hill, the job fair represents an opportunity to meet the hard-to-find engineers that his company needs.

MTU, which makes jet engines and is based in Munich, is in need of mid-career structural and mechanical engineers, those who have between 3-5 years experience in the field, Clark said. The positions pay between $60,000-$80,000 annually.

There’s a “huge demand” right now for mid-career engineers, he said. “If you can do finite element analysis you write your own ticket.”

The job fair is one of about six such events the labor department sponsors each year, Giwa said. The agency, he added, also hosts specialty job fairs for college graduates and veterans.

After today’s fair, he said, his agency will do a follow-up survey with employers to determine how many applicants they hired from the fair and to gauge the successfulness of the event.

Some of the other companies that took part in the fair included Johnson Controls, Clear Channel Radio Connecticut, Dattco Inc., Fedex, Jafra Cosmetics, Comcast and Apple Rehab of Middletown.