Dear all,
I’m new to recruitment, and have experienced a similar sense of being overwhelmed at the amount of choice as far as external fairs are concerned. I have heard differing opinions from colleagues – some really like the fairs, particularly the Target ones, whereas others find them to be a bit useless. The negative responses have mainly focused on visitors simply hoovering up any publications they can get their hands on without wanting to talk to the staff, which reduces the amount of information the staff can transmit to the visitors, as well as preventing any natural, friendly conversation.
I’m due to attend 3 fairs so far in 2013 – the Careers Group fair in London (http://www.careers.lon.ac.uk/postgrad/) and the Birmingham and London Target fairs (http://targetcourses.co.uk/content/uk-and-international-postgraduate-study-and-funding-fair-london-2013). As I focus on PG recruitment, these seemed to be good choices, and colleagues from academic departments that handle their PG recruitment in-house were keen to attend these. I am hoping that there would be strength in numbers! We’re planning on producing evaluation forms in order to assess the success of these events – I’m happy to share these results if that would be helpful. I think if the forum could come up with a list of ‘approved’ external fairs – perhaps in the form of an annotated list – that would be really useful.
With all best wishes,
Becky.
Dr Rebecca M. C. Fisher
Project Officer (Postgraduate Recruitment)