Job fairs are conducted in a very boisterous manner vouching to unveil to the unemployed and experienced candidates a host of new venues and vocations. One can always be sure of a leviathan turnout for such fairs, since there is no dearth of jobseekers.
One of the recently held such fair was JOB SCENE.
The Job fair was organized by Times Ascent at the Grand Hyaat Hotel, SantaCruz (E). Kicked off from May 5, the two day fair was designed to focus on emerging opportunities in the high growth sectors of *BPO, Retail, ITES, Information Technology, Banking, Insurance, Engineering and Marketing.
Inaugurated by Ranjan Acharya, Corporate Vice President-HR, Wipro Corporation, the event was aimed to facilitate a dialogue between organisations and job aspirants.
The fair was prognosticated to prove to be a human resource platform where recruiters could reach out to candidates and introduce their vision and expectations. The promotions of the fair adumbrated that it would be best suited for final year students and experienced professionals from BPOs, call centres, information technology software, information technology hardware, telecommunications, instrumentation, production, construction, manufacturing, petrochemicals, insurance and banking. The registration fee for candidates was Rs 30.
With great expectation candidates turned out in massive numbers only to realize that they had to wait in a huge serpentine queue. After standing for hours in the scorching heat were the candidates able to enter the premises. It was probably the chilled drinking water vendors, rather, urchins who got the best deal, as they were able to find copious parched customers.
After entering the premises many-a-dreams must have been shattered. The place was densely crowded, with voluminous people palisading all the stalls. There was not an iota of chance that a candidate could have any discussion with the concerned authorities of the respective companies. The people at the stalls were so busy that they hardly had any time to cater to the plenteous queries posed to them by the job seekers. The least that they could do, rather, the only thing that they did, was to ask the candidates to submit their resumes. If the organization would find their profile as per their requirement then they would contact the respective candidates.
There were umpteen people who had come seeking a job in IT companies, but to their surprise they found the place saturated with BPOs like *eServe, IMS (Integrated Media Solutions), Transworks, ICICI, Intellenet, Orange, 3Global Services *. It was quite flagrant that the main target was BPOs and Call Centers and IT companies were just a masquerade to attract more people!!
My experience of the JOB SCENE is not at all rosy, as my entire purpose of attending the fair got defeated. I could not interact with any organization representatives. All I did was collect their e-mail ids to mail them my CV. All the pain of standing in the parching and searing queue went down the drain, as I could have easily mailed them my resumes from the comfort of my house.
This particular Fair imposes a huge dubiousness on the credentials of any Job Fair. This could very well be the scenario in most of the Fairs, which never expect a huge turnout and end up satisfying the needs of neither the organizations nor the candidates!