What are annoying things applicants do at a job fair that disinterest job recruiters?

Eric from quora
Oh man there are a few candidates who have stood out to me. One in particular talked for almost 10 minutes and I tried politely cutting him off a few times (as I had gotten the point about his skills) before I finally had to be a little less polite. He knew as well as he said "I know there are people behind me but I just want to tell you one more thing!"

The thing about career fairs is that it's tiring, and for candidates it can be frustrating to wait in line and then only get a few minutes with the recruiters, but most of the annoying things that candidates do is to not make their intentions clear. Before you go, are you applying for a specific position, or do you have legitimate questions about the company.

Here's my annoying career fair stories mixed in with general career fair advice, having attended them, planned them and worked at career fairs in various situations:

1) The Person Who Doesn't Know Where They're Going, 2)The Person Who Doesn't Want to Wait in Line and 3) The Person Who is Angry When They Didn't Get to The Company They Want

Yes, there will be lines. Did you think that you were the only person who showed up to visit the Amazon table? Honestly?

So before you attend a career fair, make a list of who you want to see first. Anticipate that there will be lines and that even if you arrive early you may have to wait, and so the first companies you should wait for should be your first priority.

4) The Person Who Hasn't Done Their Basic Research

You ever wait behind someone to order food at a fast food place and then when they get to the front, they say "So what's on the menu?" You get annoyed with them right? And there's not even something as stressful as waiting for help getting a job, you're just hungry.

It is incredibly annoying when someone sits down and asks 'so what does your company do?' because if they don't want to work there, they're just making the sad person behind you wait in line for longer for no good reason. (And often you're making that person angry and annoyed so that by the time she sits down, she's not nervous but pissed.)

Visit each of the companies website before you attend the career fair. Poke around their employment/career section. Other people are doing this, and if you don't, you sometimes are putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. Pro-tip: you can look up the website while you are in line waiting for a company.

Make a list of questions that you have for companies, and write them down, that way you don't waste valuable time if you sit down in front of a recruiter and/or hiring manager and your mind goes blank. Cause it happens, you get nervous, but you *know* that you're going to be nervous, so plan ahead.

5) The Person Who Thinks That They Can Convince a Company to Hire Them, Even if There is No Opening.

There is nothing worse than interviewing a person who wants to be a 'conceptual font artist' or another role that is currently not vacant. It doesn't matter what you say or how amazing you are at conceiving imaginary typography, if I don't have the budget for that role (or the team, space, chair, computer, etc) we can't hire one. If you are the type of person who wants to 'create your own role', you don't do it at a career fair.

6) The Person Who Takes Too Much Time to Get to the Point

Have you ever listened to someone talk about their product development skills for five minutes and then say "but I don't want to work in product development anymore"? Can you imagine doing that with 100 people waiting behind them, knowing that you have to meet with all of those 100 people?

Practice your elevator pitch. Practice it on your phone if watching it helps you. Practice it with your friends and mentors. Practice it with your career services office if you're still in school or a recent alumni. You only get so much time to make a first impression.

7) The Person Who Believes that Dressing Up Goes Against Their Moral Code often confused with 8) The Person Who is at the Fair but Doesn't Really Need/Want a Job

Dress up (unless it's a career fair entirely made of startups who wouldn't want you to wear a suit-and even then you should be dressed like you give a damn.) The idea is that this is a big deal to you, not that you just casually stopped by the career fair on your way to anywhere else.

There are a surprising number of people who go to fairs to 'just support a friend' and 'sit down with a recruiter out of curiosity' and unless they have some skill that is incredibly rare, they often don't get called back because they've self-selected themselves as 'not looking.' And if you accidentally get put in that category because you didn't dress up, you'll be annoyed when you don't hear back because of it.

9) The Person who Makes you Take Notes in Chicken Scratch on a Napkin

Print more resumes than you anticipate handing out. If you have business cards, you can either paperclip them to the top or hand them to a recruiter, but sometimes that's redundant. If you show up and you don't have a resume, you can still make the connection, but you do end up looking unprepared, or not detail oriented.

10) The Person Who Anticipates that Every Computer is Working Quickly when 1000+ People are Sharing the Wifi

It's really annoying when someone sits down and then asks you to google them or to see their LinkedIn profile (when you may not have signed into LinkedIn this takes up more time than you anticipated and often forces you to make small talk that you don't want to do while others are waiting.)

11) The Person with the Super-Size Portfolio

If you have a portfolio, make sure that it's in a form that you can show me without taking up too much table space. If your portfolio is on a tablet/laptop, make sure that it's easy to get to your files and that if the hiring manager or recruiter presses a button we aren't going to waste minutes while you key it back up (or worse, show us a bunch of random files, and/or a scattered desktop with folders labeled 'pron' or something else that is not appropriate.) I once remember that someone was showing me their portfolio and then I tried to page forward, which accidentally closed the program and they were also rendering an image in Photoshop and we had to wait five minutes while he restarted.

12) The Person who Wants the Career Fair to Get them a Job Yesterday

Make sure that your expectations line up with how a career fair works. Nobody is offered a job at a career fair, it's a mini-interview, but not a full interview. (Full disclosure: I have been at internship fairs where students have been offered an internship on the spot, but I have never been at a career fair where anyone has been offered a job, or even confirmed an interview date on the spot.) So if you show up and want to schedule an interview, expect your recruiter to be annoyed.

Again, none of these things are a career killer but they are annoying. I know talented people who have done these things and still gotten hired, but I know far more people who went to a career fair and did the equivalent of shooting themselves in the foot with a company because they annoyed them.