Job fairs? You meen those gigs for meeting the junior HR promo girls that hands you a flyer with the company's carreers url, some branded post-it's and a mini pouch of gummi bears?

Silicon Milkroundabout – in London, UK – is the Real Thing: https://www.siliconmilkroundabout.com/

Not just HR, but actual team leads and members who you can talk to and mutually evaluate each other, face to face. It's a superb event, highly recommended!

(Looks like they've introduced a new digital system too. Intriguing...)

> Why are companies so irritatingly resistant to getting back to doing things in-person and real-time?

RTO for the recruiters, eh?

Even job fairs are useless now. I'm a current student and when I show up a lot of companies seem to just send an intern or 3rd party recruiter out with a bunch of generic company fliers. You can't ask any questions about the job because the recruiter won't know the answer, they don't work in the department or even worse they don't work for the company, and when you find a company you want to join they tell you to apply online anyway. Sometimes you get a special link for applying, which I think is how they differentiate between job fair applications and the others.

At least the few smaller companies that show up seem more immune to this, but they have the problem of wanting to pay an electrical engineer about $50,000-$60,000 for starting pay, which just isn't worth it. So everyone still puts up with the recruiters that know nothing because at least then you have a shot of earning a market rate salary.

Having gone to job fairs recently I found them to be pretty useless.

I got one lead where the guy gave me the link for good candidates and all the others were useless.

job fair for which jobs? there are barely any jobs left.