Layoffs Spur Throngs at Career Fairs

As Americans fall victim to layoffs and downsizing, they're flocking to career fairs, causing long lines and exhausting hiring managers whose booths are overflowing with candidates.

When Steven Seiler, 44 years old, first saw a line spanning two New York City blocks for a CareerBuilder.com job fair in October, he thought, "If I wasn't on the bus for an hour and 45 minutes, I would [leave]." An accountant from Staten Island, N.Y., Mr. Seiler has been out of work since late September when the firm he worked for collapsed. It took 45 minutes for Mr. Seiler to even get in the door of the career fair. Once inside, he was disappointed to learn that most of the companies were offering commission-based sales jobs or part-time work; he left after about 30 minutes.

More from WSJ.com: • Opening New Doors With a Fellowship • Broader, Deeper Job Cuts Risk Steepening Slump • For '09 Grads, Job Prospects Take a Dive

Career fairs -- organized meet-ups that aim to give employers access to many candidates at once and give job-seekers exposure to a variety of open positions -- have long been popular with recent college graduates and entry-level job seekers. Recent rounds of layoffs are spurring new crowds to attend. National Career Fairs, a Las Vegas-based company that organizes fairs for job site Monster.com throughout the country, says it has already had a 40.7% increase in attendees this year over 2007, and that's sure to continue as the year goes on.

Job site CareerBuilder.com has seen a 33% increase in job-fair attendance this year. Targeted Job Fairs, a producer of technology, engineering and security-clearance career fairs, has seen attendance increase about 16%. And a recent job fair held at the University of Phoenix football stadium by Jobing.com attracted more than 10,000 attendees -- a record, says Jobing.com spokesman Joe Cockrell. "It looked like there was a football game going on," he says.

More senior executives are standing in line, even though the caliber of jobs and companies represented at the fairs often isn't appealing to this group. Daniel Haim, vice president of customer acquisition for Innovation Ads, an online-advertising company based in New York, says he was surprised when approached by three executives who had been laid off the day before a job fair earlier this month. Mr. Haim says he was screening candidates for just three to five sales positions.

Unfortunately for job-hunters, the growing field of applicants is competing for a shrinking pool of opportunities at job fairs, as fewer potential employers sign up. Targeted Job Fairs has seen a decrease in the number of booths it is filling, especially in ailing areas like New York. "There are hiring freezes, companies laying off people and cutbacks on spending, so they might not want to lay out money for booths," says Bob Westerkamp, general manager of Targeted Job Fairs, whose booths cost $2,495.

Jobing.com's Phoenix fair, which typically draws 200 to 250 employers, drew only 174 this year, says Mr. Cockrell, despite a job-seeker attendance uptick of 28% over last year.

Still, even senior-level career-fair attendees say they're hoping to just make a connection in a marketplace crowded every day with more people just like them. "For someone in my profession and career path, this isn't great," says Brad Birnbaum, a 48-year-old director of finance who was recently downsized from a New York advertising agency. "But it's good to meet people and good for networking," he says of a job fair in New York that he attended earlier this month.

Crowded venues and lines can frustrate attendees looking to get face time with recruiters. Erin Kelly, 30, who is searching for a marketing position, says that recruiters at a Colorado job fair she attended in September seemed burnt out and were referring candidates to their company Web sites rather than accepting applications. Some lines to speak to recruiters were so long, up to 30 people deep, that she passed them by.

More from Yahoo! Finance: • Highest-Paying White-Collar Jobs • Bank Rescue: Making Wall Street Pay? • How to Make a Million Visit the Career & Work Center

"I was physically exhausted, I don't think I've ever spoken to that many people in my entire life," says Bill Lutz, a senior human-resources analyst who represented the city of Scottsdale, Ariz., at Jobing.com's fair. Mr. Lutz estimates he spoke to 2,000 people at the fair, double the amount he met with at the same fair in 2007. Mr. Lutz had only 17 open positions.

In order to deal with the crowds, job-fair organizers are advising vendors on how to be more time-efficient, by encouraging candidates to pre-register and bringing on more staff. National Career Fairs has extended the hours of career fairs in some of its major markets, to five hours from four, and advises recruiters not to spend more than a few minutes on each candidate to avoid a traffic jam. Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources for CareerBuilder, says this year many employers are bringing in up to 10 recruiters to speak with job seekers; in previous year three to five was the norm.

If you plan to brave the crowds at a career fair in the near future, experts say there are some ways to maximize your time and make yourself stand out. Pre-register online if the fair gives you the option so that you won't have to waste time in line filling out forms.

Not every company represented at the fair is worth visiting. Come with a game plan of companies in your field you want to meet with and make an A-list, a B-list and a C-list, meeting with the companies that you're most interested in first, says Paul Mathews, president and CEO of Hire Aspirations, a career-coaching and outplacement firm based in Hartford, Conn.

Research the companies you are interested in ahead of time, and familiarize yourself with their mission statement, positions they have available and recent press releases, says Mr. Mathews.

Nicholas Schulz, a 23-year-old from Woodbridge, N.J., looking at jobs in the marketing field, has developed his own trick for making the most of his time. He arrives early to reach recruiters before they get burnt out. "If you get there later on, you can see it on their faces that you're the thousandth person they've spoken to," he says.

Write to Dana Mattioli at dana.mattioli@wsj.com