Sunday, March 18, 2012

LA Academia Moderna Job Fair

A couple days ago, I took the Greyhound to a job fair in LA. I left Oakland at 10:30 pm. I arrived at 5:30 am. The job fair was to start at Academia Moderna in LA at 9 am. I was displeased with the job fair for many reasons

#1 They charged $1 for their 3 page catalog of the 25 charter schools attending. $1 for the catalog? I expected that to come for free. You want your candidates to go to the right tables, right? Well, you deter more of the right candidates from arriving at your table by charging that $1. Believe it or not, some people didn't buy that catalog. I bought one of them because I didn't want to waste time going to tables that were of no interest to me.

#2 90% of the tables I went to (I went to 10 tables out of 25) only gave out email addresses and websites. That is, one of those 10 gave an application to fill out. NONE of those tables did on the spot interviews. On the spot interviews were exactly why I came to this job fair in the first place. That's what I expected.

Here's a way to save both the employers and prospective candidates some time, money, and effort. Every charter school submits all of their email addresses, applications, and websites to a centralized location (i.e. like EdJoin). Then, all interested candidates will apply. If all employers are going to do is hand out email address and websites, it seems pointless for them to be apart of a job fair.

#3 I never really came to the job fair for this reason, but it definitely lost Academia Moderna some credibility for it. So, word was that the principal was going to show up. First, it was relayed that he would show up to give interviews at 10 am. It was relayed again that he would show up at 10:30 am. It's 11:30 and still no principal shows up. It seriously came to a point where some prospective candidates looked up a pic of him online and were asking, "Have you seen this man?"

Anyway, my next job fair is on March 24th. It seems more promising since it was stated that there will be on the spot interviews. I have that to look forward to. I posted some pics from the job fair in LA below:

Cover  Page of Catalog



Page 1




Page 2




Page 3




"Academia Moderna"



Entrance




Left Side of Room (First ten tables)




Right Side of Room (First 10 tables)

 
 

 Back Wall (First Half of Tables 13 -23)




Back Wall (Second Half of Tables 13 - 23)

2 comments:

  1. I saw an ad on craigslist about this annual job fair coming up this April. After reading this post about you attending it last year and looking up Academia Moderna, I feel a little discouraged. I may go anyway to pass out my resume. Thanks for the review!

    ReplyDelete
  2. In these types of job fair's you're being informally interviewed so be professional. I have never heard of a job fair given an "on the spot" interview. These schools are probably getting a pool of candidates to contact for interviews when they have open positions.

    ReplyDelete