The Job Fair

or

The 10th Circle of Hell

In the late summer of 2010, and against my better judgment, I attended a local job fair ostensibly hosted by the New York State Department of Labor. I thought perhaps there might be avenues for employment I’ve overlooked, maybe opportunities within the local health care or small business communities. I expected to see a preponderance of hospital or retail sales jobs, commission-based insurance selling – that sort of thing. That is exactly what I found as well as recruiters for limo drivers, the military, community colleges, and far more home health care service providers than I ever imagined.

Something else I didn’t expect: the sheer number and variety of people who came out to this event from all across the tri-state area. I arrived at 10:00 a.m., hoping to avoid what I figured would be an early-arrival crush but attendees were still arriving in droves. The large parking lot of the Psychiatric Center, where the fair was being held, was already full.

I approached the security gate and the attending guard leaned his head out the window. He was a friendly fellow and jokingly asked, “What are they doing in there? Giving out free cheese?”

“Free cheese? I wish.” I replied. “We’re looking for jobs. It’s a job fair.”

“Jobs?” He shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “Shee-it. Sorry but the lot’s full. You’ll have to park on the street.”  I wondered why I was the first person he asked.

I exited the lot and wound up circling the neighborhood for about 30 minutes, looking for a parking space. Every street in this normally deserted neighborhood of former summer bungalows was clogged with traffic, every legal parking space taken and I passed several cars flirting with illegal ones or trying small ones on for size. The streets of this neighborhood wound around higgily-jiggily to and away from a main thoroughfare and unexpectedly dead-ended or doubled back on themselves. We were lost, all of us, driving around in circles, looking for a place to land.

The roads were narrow, not intended to accommodate such heavy traffic with cars parked on both sides of the street and shoehorned in between driveways. Several residents stood in front of their homes, guarding those driveways and giving us the stink eye as we cruised slowly past.  I would not have been surprised to see one pull out a shotgun.  I remembered reading about a certain neighborhood in this borough that didn’t take kindly to the idea that public parking spaces could be occupied all day by commuters using a nearby express bus. So they smashed windshields. Repeatedly. Several times a week, commuters would return to their cars after a long hard day paying taxes only to find their windows smashed out, doors horribly keyed, or headlights broken. I left the area and decided to take my chances elsewhere, eventually finding a spot near the local beach, a good ½ mile from the job fair.

On entering the Psychiatric Center’s grounds, I fall in line with one of the several slow-moving columns of people trudging in from various directions around the campus.  We are a quiet group. At the entrance, the converging columns merge into a single silent line and we are each handed a color-coded form marked with a symbol. Mine is green with a triangle in the upper right corner. We are instructed to wait in the auditorium. We will be called according to the color of our form and the symbol which, presumably, means will be called according to our arrival time…I think. I have no idea. I also have no idea what it is exactly that we will be “called” to do.

We are then herded into a large school-like auditorium, with drapery lined walls and a large stage, much like you might find at a decent neighborhood’s high school production of Oklahoma! This apparently is the holding area, where we have been instructed to complete the color-coded forms while we wait. The first item we are asked to enter on the form is a social security number. I have no idea what jobs are being filled or who these people are or what will happen to this form when I submit it. I leave the box blank.

I select a seat in the third row, off to the side. I want to get a good look at the room’s occupants. Who are the people sitting in this room? I know why they’re here—same reason as me—but who are they? What kind of jobs did they have? How did they end up in this situation? What set of experiences drove them to this level of desperation and, dare I say it, humiliation? How many times have they been rejected? Do they really expect something positive can come from a job fair? What do they hope to find behind the last door? What do they expect? Do they know anyone who actually found meaningful work from attending such an event or are they, like me, doing this out of a faithless sense of obligation that anything positive will result? Do any of us even believe in the concept of “meaningful” work any longer?

The place smells of insecticide. I find an ant crawling on my arm. I regret not bringing something to read.

We are a diverse bunch sitting in this auditorium. We are old, we are young, we are blue collar, white collar, and no collar at all. We are black and brown and white and beige and pink and all of us are blue. We wear suits, three-piece and track, cardigan sets and business casual. We wear laborers’ blues or hospital scrubs that signal we are ready, willing, and prepared to be at a job site within 5 minutes if summoned.

Some of us are as nattily attired and self-composed as the CEO of a Fortune 500 firm; some of us are nervous, an expression of desperate apprehension frozen onto our faces. Some of us look as if we should be playing canasta by the pool of some Arizona retirement community while others of us appear to have never worked a day our entire brief lives. We dress like students, we dress like housewives, we dress like lawyers and civil servants and municipal workers and corporate executives and teachers. We look like the contents of any random New York City subway car during the morning rush. In fact, we were the contents of any random New York City subway car until we were disgorged way before reaching our intended destination and now we are sitting here, holding color coded forms, watching ants crawl up our arms and we don’t know why.

Almost everyone here looks vaguely familiar. I have seen these faces countless times before, every time I look in the mirror.

I look to my right and to my left, seeking out a face that might be open to conversation.  I want to learn about them. I want to hear their stories and I want to tell them mine. I want to commiserate. I want to learn how we all ended up sitting in this same drifting boat. No one meets my gaze. This is not a chatty crowd. This is not like jury duty where friendships instantly materialize on the basis of a shared annoyance with a civil obligation. This is something different, something darker. Here, there is no small-talk, no banter, no sense of expectation or speculation or let’s-make-the-best-of-it-ness. No one here knows what’s on the other side of that last door and no one seems to want to even acknowledge its existence, let alone talk about it. The room is eerily quiet.

I scan the hall and guesstimate that at any given point throughout the day, there are 1-2,000 people in this auditorium. Every ten minutes or so, groups of 50 or so are “called” and escorted from the holding area to…somewhere else. Vacated seats are immediately occupied by the next incoming group. It is now 11:30 am. This has been going on since 8:00 and shows no sign of abating.

At 12:30, a female handler—I will call her Charon—shouts “green triangles.” About 50 of us quickly leave our seats and gather before Charon at the back of the auditorium. Our forms are collected and quickly scanned for completion. Those who, like me, did not enter a social security number are ordered to do so immediately or leave. I jot down some random numbers and Charon OKs me  to pass.  We follow Charon in a single file out of the auditorium and down a long hall where we are stopped in front of a set of double doors guarded by another handler. I will call him Cerberus. Cerberus raises his hand to get our attention. “OK everybody. Now big smiles!” he booms. “Positivity! Energy! Smiles! The recruiters want to see positive energy and nothing says positive energy like a great big smile.” I stare at him incredulously. I glance behind me to see the others’ reactions. Some roll their eyes. No one is smiling. As each of us pass his grinning face on our way through the door, he pats a shoulder and reminds us to “Smile!”

We enter a huge, brightly lit room with an enormous square of folding tables arranged in the center. Recruiters sit on folding chairs inside the square, while applicants circle the perimeter, much like I imagine Paolo and Francesca have been doing in the 9^th Circle since I-don’t-know-when.  No one is smiling. Very few are even talking. Even the franchise hucksters are strangely grim and quiet, perhaps in recognition of the futility of trying to sell big-ticket investment opportunities to people behind on their utility bills.

I fall in line and cruise the perimeter too, reading the little placards identifying the represented companies or glancing at brochures. Scatterred among the franchise opportunities are recruiters for insurance agencies, local outfits hiring limo and car service drivers, a few community colleges recruiting students, nursing homes, numerous health care services providers recruiting aides to work in people’s homes, and the U.S. Marine Corps. One station appears to be quite popular, with a line of about 30 job applicants, so I check it out. It’s a recruiter for a large local hospital. Some of the applicants standing in line are those folks wearing scrubs.  They are instructed to fill out an application and deposit it in a cardboard box after which the recruiter says, “We’ll be in touch.” I wonder how this venue provides a more effective means of landing a hospital job than simply visiting the facility’s HR department.

I am disheartened and disappointed but not at all surprised. There is nothing here for me so I decide to have a bit of fun and visit the military recruiter to discuss the opportunities in store for a 4’11”, 58-year-old woman with the U.S. Marines. As I make my way toward the Marine, I spot the HR drone from the nursing home (see “Lemonade“) I interviewed with two weeks ago—the one that mysteriously rejected me after the hiring manager literally burst into tears when she declared that she had just met her ideal partner. The HR drone is sitting alone, glancing around the room looking bored and uncomfortable.  What luck! I will embark on a friendly little fact-finding mission, an effort to understand why I was so quickly rejected after such a positive and promising conversation. I realize I’m actually a little elated by the prospect of finally getting a bit of feedback, some explanation of the factors that went into the hiring decision, some valuable nugget of information that might shed some light on the underlying cause of this ongoing, never-ending series of rejections, some small insight I can use to improve my job-seeking skills, or enhance my presentation or…something, anything.

As I approach, a friendly smile of recognition flashes across the drone’s face and then quickly dissipates as she remembers who I am. The conversation proceeds thusly:

Me: “Hi. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m (Anonymous by Necessity). I interviewed with you and your development director for an opening in her department about two weeks ago?”

Drone:  “Yes, yes, I remember you. That position has been filled.”

Me: “Yes, I know. You told me when I called. But I’m very confused. I’m hoping you can help me understand because my conversation with the director went so well that I was almost certain…”

Drone: “Look, I’m very busy right now.”

Me, looking around:  “No you’re not.”

Drone, looking past me at a non-existent cue forming behind me: “I said, I’m very busy.”

Me:  “Please don’t do that. There’s no one here except you and me. I’m not trying to make trouble. I’d just appreciate some information, some explanation as to how we went from an “ideal partner” (using air quotes) to an out-and-out rejection over the course of a single weekend.”

Drone: “There are intangibles that effect every hiring decision.”

Me: “Intangibles?”

Drone:  “Yes, intangibles.”

Me: “Such as…? Can you give me an example of what such an intangible might be?”

Drone:  “No, because they’re intangible.” (She says the word as if it means “unspeakable” but I’m in no mood to debate semantics.)

With that, she got up, moved to the center of the square of tables and busied herself rearranging boxes. An image flashed in my mind, of me leaping across the barrier, pinning her in a headlock and pummeling her noggin until she reveals the truth: “Why wasn’t I hired? What’s the intangible?” To which she’d respond: “You’re too short.” “You’re too old.” “You gave us the heebee-jeebees.” “The chairwoman of the board of trustees made us hire her niece.” At which point, I’d release her, say “thank you” and calmly walk away, satisfied with my prowess in information gathering.

What the heck just happened? How did a simple request for feedback, from one adult to another, result in a fantasy of school-yard violence?

I indulged the image for a few seconds then walked away. I passed the Marine recruiter on my way out the door but was no longer in a joking mood. He didn’t seem to be either.

On my way back to the car parked near the beach, I decided to salvage what was left of the day and take a stroll by the shore but by the time I reached the car, it had started to rain.

Lesson learned: Unless specific to your particular career path, skill set, or educational training, job fairs are a complete and total waste of time, energy, and natural resources. Other than that, they pretty much follow the narrative arc of Dante’s Inferno.