Startup Career Fair draws hundreds of job seekers

 

Mohawk College’s SURGE entrepreneur program ran a Startup Career Fair event this week in concert with other ecosystem partners (The Forge, Spectrum, Innovation Factory, SBEC, Mohawk McKeil Business School). The career fair saw over 50 local companies seeking employees connect with over 400 attendees seeking jobs, mostly co-op hungry Mohawk College students.

The career fair featured a bevy of local tech startups like QResrve, BucketLife, Thrive Games, Chipsetter and many more. Obviously as a Hamilton tech booster it felt really awesome to see a room full of Hamilton firms connecting with a room full of local students. The sheer numbers involved will ensure that this event had a substantial benefit for many people.

The event was easily the largest and most successful startup job fair ever held in the city, and it really speaks well towards future job prospects within tech firms in particular.

 

 

One thing I noticed was that a lot of companies were looking for full-time, ready-to-go on day one employees, where as a lot of the students were looking for co-ops (understandable on both fronts of course). One thing that has made the Waterloo region such a success is the fleets of University of Waterloo co-op students fuelling the local firms to mutual benefit (gaining experience, while providing good, reasonably cost-effective labour).

Ultimately economics drives things… when firms can’t find fully qualified full-timers at the price they want they tend to need to either pay more or go with less experienced labour (including co-op labour). But I couldn’t help but wonder if there is a way to help firms figure out how to get more out of co-op students, or otherwise become more interested in hiring co-ops students, perhaps by giving them a better indication as to how to “onboard” a co-op student (which is understandably going to involve more training). Hmmm….