Face-to-Face
Well I must say that I enjoy doing the Face-to-Face event…. It is so different form the day to day issues of planning events…. Locked away in a quiet office, it took me the better part of 5 full days to set some 500 plus appointments for the post secondary students to meet over a 4 hour period with 20 employers. Each student submits 5 appointment request with companies that are seeking students to match the current job openings. It all gets loaded into an excel spreadsheet. Going through each request one at a time setting up the “speed dating” job interviews for each student. Once complete I then search for appointment conflicts for each student…. after finding some 50 conflicts and resolving them – we then sort the spreadsheet in various ways to extract each of the 20 companies set of appointments – most companies are sending 2 sets of staff to run simulatneous interviews – 2 sets of appointments for most companies. This is followed by sending out 114 emails to all of the students confirming their 5 appointments. It all works like clockwork until we arrive on site at Tudor Hall to find out that some of the students that had to cancel etc due to illness or conflicts. I proceed to update all of the company appointments with the students cancellations - only to find that some student names were not appearing on company appointment lists…..How can this be? I used the 1 master spreadsheet for all confirmations — in total I found 4 names that were confirmed appointments that somehow were not on the company lists… I was very stressed — the event was about to start in 30 minutes… how many more students would show up that had conflicts? Again how could this happen? The event starts and I wait to see how it unfolds…first set of appointments no problem, second set fine… but we get to the third round and here comes the first conflict — the conflict is resolve — and so when is the next one, how many more am I going to face in the next 3.5 hours……. NONE!!!
The rest of the afternoon for all students and companies went off great!!!
What a great and unique way to do a “job fair” – we set appointments and match students to employers…. We even had a student there this year helping with the interviews who was a student at Face-to-Face 2007 — he was hired and now he his back doing the hiring!!!
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