I had an oppor­tu­nity to par­tic­i­pate at no cost in a vir­tual job fair so I thought, “What the heck?”. I have some excel­lent intern­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able, it’s the per­fect was to test drive the venue. I went all out, set up my booth, got on the web­cam to talk about the orga­ni­za­tion and the type of stu­dents I’m look­ing for.

Stu­dents and alumni of 5 local col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties were invited to attend. I’m really happy with the 329 booth views. The result was 29 resumes sub­mit­ted. I reviewed them and selected 17 to respond by vir­tual inter­view to the 3 screen­ing ques­tions I selected.

Frankly, I’m baf­fled at the fact only 1 stu­dent sub­mit­ted a com­pleted inter­view! Most of the other com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions par­tic­i­pat­ing didn’t go as far as I did with the web­cam and whole 9 yards, they just put up a few para­graphs and called it a day.  They’ll just col­lect resumes and call appli­cants back the old fash­ioned way.

My excite­ment has been kind of deflated. I was encour­aged by the vir­tual job fair com­pany that set it up that all col­lege stu­dents have web­cams on their lap­tops and the response would be great.  I did have a voice mail from some­one who said she tried but had dif­fi­culty upload­ing her video responses. I called her back and left her a mes­sage and it ended there with phone tag.

There is a con­tact us but­ton on the site but no help desk num­ber for imme­di­ate assis­tance. Are appli­cants hav­ing issues and giv­ing up or what?

Have you par­tic­i­pated in one of these as an employer or job seeker and what was your expe­ri­ence? I need to know if I scared away the appli­cants away with my video or if there’s an issue. Help!