Reverse job fair Jan 16th: Job seekers have tables, recruiters walk around. | Hacker News Reader

Reverse job fair Jan 16th: Job seekers have tables, recruiters walk around.

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54 pointsTimothyFitz25 comments

Reminds of this study on speed dating:

When men rotated, women (the ones sitting) were more selective. But when women did the rotating, men (the ones sitting) were more selective. Nothing else changed in the experiment, so it was the act of doing the approaching (or being approached) that helped determine a person’s selectivity toward their partner.

http://www.livescience.com/culture/090929-women-dating.html

So that fair should be good for the job seekers.

The number of companies looking to hire at this event exceeds the number of job seekers. If you are an unemployed HN reader in the Bay Area you _have_ to attend this event.

Or if you're an employed HN reader looking for a new gig - it's on a Saturday..

But what if your currently employer goes and sees you at a table?

Then you'll need the job fair even more!

Or you might be offered a raise.

If you see one of your employees at this event, you should try to figure out what's wrong. If someone is motivated enough to be actively seeking other employment, it may be a sign that something is seriously wrong with your company.

most likely it's a sign that their direct manager may be mistreating their underlings.

I guess that falls into company problems.

Now to convince somebody to set up a laptop on a table with me appearing live via video conference.

As information disseminates, this market will correct itself (assuming there are no caps/regulations on number of attendees.)

You have to present yourself there. Some people who go to a `normal' job fair may not be comfortable with this.

This is must be a new trend of ego-stroking stories on HN: first there was the "Interview your potential employer" story, then yesterdays "Ask them for code samples", and now this.

Look, if you're unemployed in this market, you can play coy all you want and "tease" would be employers, but that will not in anyway rewrite the power inequality to your favor. If you want "power", start your own company, freelance, or work for yourself in any other form. But right now, going through these lengths to play "hard to get" just makes you look like one of those unattractive people at night clubs who think being obnoxious to you makes them sexy.

I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of the job fair. In my mind, most programmers aren't great at walking up to 20 random new people; it's draining for people who aren't naturally social (I know it's draining for me). Flipping up the natural order aligns the social people (Recruiters) with the social activities (Cold introduction, striking up a conversation).

For perspective, I'm going to the job fair looking for employees (IMVU Inc, we're hiring, we're awesome).

Logistically speaking, it's more efficient to have 20 tables, and 200 people walking around, than to have 200 tables and 20 people walking around. There will always be more candidates than jobs, usually 10x more. This is the efficiency argument.

Saying programmers can't walk up to 20 random new people because it's "draining" to them is both offensive and unfair. Remember, programmers are grown men and women too. It's infantilizing. Capable professionals are more than willing to talk to you, either because they like what your company is doing, or because they have bills to pay.

If you think someone is too socially awkward to speak to random strangers, wait until they have a desk all to themselves, and now the strangers are coming to talk to them.

Who says employers will only bring a single recruiter per company? Most of the companies listed are actually bringing 3-5 company people to help recruit, so it will still be pretty efficient.

Also, I'm hoping that we have at least 50 candidates or so, it seems like the job market here in the Valley is really strong so it might be hard to find people looking to switch/find new jobs. So far we only have 30 candidates confirmed...

I wonder what the business model behind "myfreeimplants" is... oh.

Which is why "myfreeenlargement" probably would not work.

I'd love to see one of these on the East Coast.

Let's see how this one goes. If this event helps people find jobs, I have the resources to help take this event to the East Coast.

But the final pairing between companies and seekers is still going to be extremely asymmetrically one-to-many... aside from stroking developers' egos, how is this model superior?

For one, it self-selects developers who are proactive, with a can-do attitude. They are most likely above average, so that in turn should attract good companies. I know I would look around to see what talent is there.

I know there is an argument that the greatest coders would not bother. That's probably true, but you may get access to the level immediately below: not bad...

I think there will be more job seekers than employer representatives. Not everybody wants to plaster their name on a webpage saying "I'm looking for a job!"

It's also before (and close to) SHDH 36, so people will have reason to be in the area.

We'll see how it goes next Saturday.

I expected there to be more job seekers than employer representatives, but as of now (time_t: 1262991491) there are more companies signed up for the "recruiter" mailing list than there are on the "job seeker" mailing list.

As far as seeing "how it goes", the reason we are using mailing lists for "signup" is so we can gauge the success of the event not just on Saturday, but 30, 60 and 90 days after the event.

We hope that this model will help highlight developers strengths and shorten the hiring pipeline for the companies that are hiring.

Success at a typical job fair requires that the job seekers have a certain amount of personal salesmanship. We changed the format of this event to highlight the strengths of developers - many developers aren't comfortable promoting themselves.

Additionally, there is no way for recruiters to judge the technical competency of job seekers at a typical job fair. Because of this most hiring pipelines start with a technical phone screen, which isn't always done by an engineer - it's pretty easy to convince engineers to come to this job fair and to technical screening: SuperHappyDevHouse is immediately afterwords.

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