We recently hosted our 5th diversity job fair of the year in Atlanta last Tuesday, June 10 and if I were to describe it in one phrase it would without a doubt be “a warm welcome.”
Being based in south Florida, we usually travel to the cities 2 days prior to each of our events, so we arrived in Atlanta on Sunday afternoon and immediately realized the temperature was close to 100 degrees during our entire stay. Despite the warm, sticky weather, this was not enough to melt our anxiousness to get this show underway. All preparations seemed to be just right, everything was in place and a possible afternoon thunderstorm advisory was the only element of concern for our job fair.
I had visited Atlanta at least 3 times per year since 2001 as my brother lived there, and have had the opportunity to meet some great people throughout my visits. Most of which, were in the engineering field, proud Georgia Tech and University of Georgia alumni. Also, it seems that many of the people that live in Atlanta have moved there seeking better employment opportunities, and they seem to call it home shortly after. Atlanta is home to very large companies such as Home Depot, Georgia Pacific, Coca Cola, and many more – all of which also lean towards engineering, supply chain management, logistics, and more…so I was definitely expecting a large engineering crowd.
We had great companies recruiting on site, including Newell-Rubbermaid, Praxair, GE Infrastructure, and Michelin, just to name a few. After observing and talking to a large amount of the 685+ candidates that came to our show seeking multicultural jobs, I realized that yes, we did seem to attract a large engineering crowd…but we also saw a large finance, marketing, sales, customer service, IT, healthcare and education group that proceeded to interview with employers in their fields, such as CDC, Wachovia, Aflac and more.
A warm day dissipated the rain threat, and overall it was a great event. We saw a diverse candidate pool interact with a good mix of companies, which is what our job fairs are all about: Connecting high quality, diverse and bilingual candidate talent with top diversity employers offering bilingual jobs. After a short summer break (maybe avoiding heat exhaustion and preparing for hurricane season), we look forward to our next event and number six on our 2008 calendar: Washington DC.
