So, when do I start?

Steve Ulfelder   Today’s Top Stories   or  Other Computerworld Stories  

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January 10, 2000 Steve Magner looks around the ballroom. He's the worst-dressed guy in the joint. Under a grudging necktie, his top shirt button is open. His blazer would get him tossed out of a used-car salesmen's convention. His beat-up cargo pants puddle on his beat-up bucks.
Magner looks at the hiring companies' banners. Where to start? AlliedSignal? Geico? Raytheon? Whatever. He slouches off to hand out resumes.
Steve Magner is actually me in disguise. Not that it was too much of a stretch to dress like a slob.
Computerworld recently got to wondering about information technology job fairs. In the Internet age, do they count for much?
Some say they add valuable face-to-face time for both prospect and hiring company. Others scoff and say they're mere cattle calls, staffed by human resources people who can't possibly evaluate candidates' IT skills. Job seekers' resumes, these critics say, simply wind up in the to-be-scanned pile. We couldn't find any IT workers who seemed especially fond of job fairs.
Still, according to a recent Computerworld survey, 10% of all IT workers are hired through recruiting events. That's way behind the leading tool -- employee referrals, at 25% -- but it's fourth on the list, ahead of search agencies (8%) and paid Internet recruiting services (also 8%). People use these fairs.
There are, of course, different kinds of IT recruiting events. You've got your campus fairs, where students are glad-handed and rushed just as they were during Greek Week. And you've got your single-company fairs, where Conglomerate.com opens its doors seeking everything from mail room staff to line-of-business executives.
But we were curious about classic, multicompany fairs put on by outfits such as Westech ExpoCorp and Kaplan Career Services. These companies are the leaders in the run-what-you-brung IT fairs that pop up at hotels all over the country.
Hence the birth of Steve Magner. Who is, not to put too fine a point on it, kind of a loser. No doubt a disappointment to his family. Can't hold a job. Can't write his way out of a paper bag. Couldn't even be bothered to spell-check his resume.
He does have one thing going for him: He's an Oracle database administrator with a couple years' experience. These days, an Oracle database administrator -- any database administrator -- is worth his weight in gold, right? Steve Magner set out to find just how much of a creep an Oracle database administrator could be and still get real interview offers.
That's why Magner is at a Kaplan career fair, in a ballroom, in a place called Martin's Crosswinds (described by one local cynic as a "wedding factory") in Greenbelt,

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