

How to talk to recruiters at a career fair - kevinburke
http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/how-to-talk-to-recruiters-at-a-career-fair/

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johnbroccoli
A student asking if a company is hiring full-time engineers is not naive in
the slightest. You're writing purely from the perspective that all companies
behave exactly like Twilio. In my experience (granted this was a couple of
years ago), many companies at career fairs are sometimes looking only for
interns. Some are just there for some advertisement, not hiring but still
maintaining a relationship with the company.

With regards to the point about Java, rather than looking at just the
language, I would think it's more worthwhile to see what a person has built
with the tools they have knowledge of, rather than extrapolating that they are
unwilling to learn something new.

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publicfig
I'm really sick of people saying that you shouldn't wear a suit to a career
fair. I understand the implication those who say it are trying to make, but it
just doesn't work out that way. Any career fair I have been to, especially
when it's for students, the kids dressed down are not doing so because they
are confident and talented enough to not worry about impressions. Instead,
those are the kids who either did not care enough to prepare for it, possibly
have a class assignment that requires going or most often, just take
themselves too seriously to be a viable candidate.

Also, to recommend that someone dresses down for the few positions that might
be okay with that really limits who the student can meet with. While a few
companies may be casual and willing to take someone in who didn't put the time
into even preparing themselves for the career fair, many companies (including
quite a few bigger companies that would be more likely to hire and invest in
new talent) would be turned off immediately.

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philwelch
There's preparing yourself for a career fair (which I would characterize as
having a fairly specific "hit list" of companies to speak to and topics to
talk to them about) and then there's wearing a suit (spending at least $100 on
a rarely-worn garment on a college student's budget). One of these is a much
more meaningful activity than the other. And given the culture of technology
companies and the high demand for developers, you _want_ to limit who's going
to take you seriously.

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philwelch
(on not knowing what specifically you want to work on) "If you are not sure,
one good strategy is to rotate - tell one company you'd like to do frontend
work, tell the next you'd like to work on mobile and tell the third company
you'd like to work on big data. Next summer (or in your spare time) you can
try out something different."

...so instead of you just randomly picking what subfield to slot a college
hire into, you're asking them to pick randomly and lie about being interested
in it?

