Advice for Students at Careers Fairs and Meet and Greets

Students! 

Your first careers fair or employer meet and greet is coming up soon, and I bet you're excited to find a job. I bet you're probably thinking you're pretty cool, and your experience is what we're looking for. Great.

But. There are a lot of you. And I meant a lot of you. We're looking for reasons to shortlist, say no and rule people out. Don't let that happen. Quite frankly, you need to work very hard to stand out. I'm serious about this. You need to put in the work. So here's what you do:

1. Reflect on your interests. Who are you? What do you wanna be? Do you like front end coding? Server side coding? Ops? Business? Social media? Design? 
2. Find out what we need. Go deep. Find our product, try use it, inspect their frontend code, try query their backend. Figure out who they are and what they do.
3. Play match maker. Find the top 10 companies you want to work for at the fair and prepare for all of them. And I mean prepare!
   1. Make a list
   2. Stalk us in LinkedIn to find who works there
   3. Come up with questions that show passion and insight for that company
4. Nail the conversation. Please please please come prepared with:
   1. What you can bring to our company
   2. What experience you have that we're looking for
   3. What you think you can add to our company

This process will take time. Spend at least 15 minutes researching every company. This first impression is crucial. Don't waste our time on the day and don't waste your own. We don't want to hear "Um, so what does your company do" or "What kind of person are you looking for?". You already should know. 

You basically get one shot to make a good impression, so why wouldn't you take it seriously and put in the work to make it the best for all of us?

Good luck. You got this.
Sam