We are down to our last couple of spaces for exhibitors! Please let us know if you’d like to exhibit at our LasVegasSun.com Career Fair on April 6th at Green Valley Ranch. Our exhibitors always tell us we have the most qualified and professional job seekers. Contact us at 702-240-4100 for more information.
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I was able to attend the UNLV Career Day this past Wednesday. What a great event!!! It has been a few years since I attended one of the Career Day events and I was not sure what to expect with the current economic situation we are facing. But let me tell you, it was a positive atmosphere throughout the entire Thomas and Mack Center. There were 105 employers on hand representing multiple industries from all areas of the country. Several thousand students attended the event to learn more about the employment opportunities offered. These students were professionally dressed and well prepared. It was an awesome experience.
Kudos go out to Eileen McGarry and her team from UNLV Career Services. They do a very important job for UNLV and they do it well. Right now is the time that employers in Las Vegas need to embrace UNLV Career Services and work with them to hire ‘our own.’ Education is important to our economic recovery and UNLV produces our future workforce.
The LasVegasSun.com January Career Fair started the year in the right direction for many job seekers. Many Las Vegas companies attended the career fair in high hopes to fill their open recruitments. The turn out for the career fair was outstanding as 1800 job seekers walked through the doors to find their next career path and 50 companies were in attendance, such as Clearwire, Country Financial, Sunrise Health, Geo Holiday, La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries, Station Casinos, Lotus Broadcasting, Social Security Administration, Telemundo, and many more.
Throughout the day job seekers were given the opportunity to attend a variety of Career Development Workshops in a separate area of the career fair. “How to Land a Job in Las Vegas” presented by Scott Linklater was packed full. Other areas of development that were presented were: “Writing a Powerful Resume”, “How to Apply Online the Right Away”, “Social Networking”, and many more.
The next career fair is scheduled for April 6, 2010 located at the Green Valley Ranch Resort and Casino.
The LasVegasSun.com Career Fair held last week attracted the highest quality jobseekers in the market as it consistently does. The demographics presented below speak for themselves. We set forth with a goal/mission over two years ago to produce the best career fair in Las Vegas and partner with the best employers in the marketplace. We have achieved that goal. Here is just one of many testimonials from our valued clients:
“Thank you for inviting Sunrise Health to participate in the LasVegasSun.com Career Fair at Green Valley Ranch Resort. It is rare that we are able to find registered nurses or allied health professionals at local Las Vegas job fairs. Your events are much different and we are able to speak with dozens of local and relocating health care professionals. At the last event, we hired three registered nurses and are talking with several others. This will save my company thousands of dollars in unnecessary travel expenses that come with attending out-of-market career fairs. Continue to keep up the good work. Recruiting Nevada makes a huge difference for Las Vegas.”
Ron Winkler
Market Director, Recruitment/Retention
Sunrise Health Market
Sunrise Hospital & Medical Center & Sunrise Children’s Hospital
Mountain View Hospital
Southern Hills Hospital
A lot of the success is due to our Seminar Series. After surveying our clients after each event, we were consistently asked, “Can you help deliver a better prepared applicant.” We accepted the challenge and developed a series of workshops, presenting over 10 topics. Each workshop is presented to hundreds of jobseekers attending the career fair by area human resource professionals. You will hear our mantra of “Building a Better Job Seeker” from time to time as we continue to grow and develop this initiative. For our 2010 schedule, we have even expanded the seminars to three rooms. And jobseekers will be able to attend various tracks prior to the doors opening to the career fair.
If you wish to participate in these workshops, please be sure to connect with Chelsey, Tamya or me at (702) 240-4100.
Below are the demographics from October’s Career Fair. You can also download and print them here.
Please note: The high concentration of health care jobseekers was intentional. With eighteen Nevada Hospitals attending the event, we aggressively marketed to this audience.
With the ever-increasing unemployment level, more and more highly educated professionals find themselves unemployed. They search for jobs in Las Vegas on area job boards such recruitingnevada.com and attend the Las Vegas Career Fairs we promote. Here are the demographics of the pre-registered jobseekers from our August 2009 event. Our next career fair will be held on October 29, 2009. If you are interested in exhibiting, it is not too late to register.
The team at Recruiting Nevada is proud to announce that we have changed the name of the Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair to the LasVegasSun.com Career Fair. The first event held under the new name will be on August 20, 2009 at Green Valley Ranch. With the tightening economy it made sense to partner with LasVegasSun.com to gain added media exposure and remain the most prominent Las Vegas career fair.
As many of you already now, the Las Vegas Sun has had a longstanding history in the Las Vegas valley and is well known for winning several national awards, with the most recent being a Pulitzer Prize. Born from a movement to aid the little guy, the Las Vegas Sun has been an important part of the Las Vegas community for more than 50 years. Founding publisher Hank Greenspun died in 1989, but he left a legacy of intrepid and forthright journalism that Sun reporters and editors follow to this day.
The seeds of the Las Vegas Sun were planted in 1949 when the town’s only newspaper, the Review-Journal, locked out members of the printing union. As a result, the International Typographical Union began its own newspaper on May 3, 1950, but struggled financially. The ITU then turned to Hank Greenspun.
The LasVegasSun.com Career Fair will continue to be recognized around the valley as the only career fair worth attending for both job seekers and employers.
LasVegasSun.com Career Fairs are held exclusively at Green Valley Ranch in the Estancia Ballroom. The next career fair will be on August 20, 2009 from noon to 4:00 pm. As with past events, there is a $100 discount on all early registrations. Additionally, a free job posting will immediately be placed on the Recruiting Nevada Network, generating nearly 1 million monthly page views. Booth(s) must be reserved by August 1, 2009 in order to receive these discounts.
Recruiting Nevada has been instrumental in the growth of the Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair. Opportunity Boulevard started out as a strategic partnership between Greenspun Media Group (GMG) and Recruiting Nevada. Today, GMG owns Recruiting Nevada through an acquisition made over a year ago. The entire team of Recruiting Nevada stayed on-board and has built the best job fair in Las Vegas exponentially with the help of Chelsey Kuzyk ,who has led the charge.
We are currently going through another evolution and taking the career fair to the next level. The biggest change will be the name of the Career Fair. The event will be branded, and become known, as the Las Vegas Sun Career Fair. Why the name change? We did some polling and it appeared that Opportunity Boulevard was sometimes confused with Opportunity Village, one of the most recognized charities in Las Vegas. We wanted to add clarity to the event name, yet leverage the power of the Las Vegas Sun brand. As most know, the Las Vegas Sun has been the community’s favorite newspaper for over 50 years. And with Greenspun’s focus on making LasVegasSun.com the best website in Las Vegas, the re-branding of the event to the Las Vegas Sun Career Fair just makes sense.
But, obviously a name is not a strategic plan. It is just a name. Our strategic plan has been developed by our clients – both jobseekers and employers. The strategic plan is quite simple. Deliver the best career fair in Las Vegas that fulfills the needs of both jobseekers and employers. Continuously solicit feedback from our clients. And more importantly, listen. Finally, adjust the focus of the event to address the current employment market.
For those of you who have attended our career fairs, you have been instrumental in our success and we thank you. It is your candid feedback and suggestions that have allowed us to be recognized as the leading career fair company in Las Vegas. After each event, we survey participating companies and ask what we did right, and what we could improve on. Each event, we try to improve on a couple of the recommended areas.
One of those areas has been our seminar series. This concept was brought to us by our health care clients, including St. Rose Dominican Hospitals, Valley Health System, Sunrise Health System and North Vista Hospital. After attending a few of our Las Vegas job fairs, we asked “If there one thing that we could do to improve the event, what would that one thing be?”
As we all know, there are always plenty of nurse jobs in Las Vegas. Many of the jobseekers would approach their booths and ask how they can go about getting trained to enter the health care profession. So, we approached one of our strategic partners….the Southern Nevada Medical Industry Coalition (SNMIC). SNMIC has a Education Task Force made up of various colleges that offer training in health care. We asked if they could assemble a panel of various schools to present to interested job seekers. The good folks at Touro University, UNLV and College of Southern Nevada all accepted. Over 70 interested job seekers attended the first session. The level of engagement was amazing. The jobseekers gave raving reviews (we survey them as well) and I imagine many have since enrolled in an available program.
From that one seminar, we have introduced several others including resume writing, navigating the governmental application process, career transitioning, opportunities as a guest room attendant and the entrepreneurial side of available career opportunities. We solicit feedback from our jobseekers after each seminar. Those that get great reviews we continue and improve. Those that don’t, we remove and replace with another seminar. And we repeat.
There is no real secret to our process. We ask for feedback. And more important – we listen. As much as we would like to take credit, we simply deliver what our clients (both jobseekers and employers) ask for. Not much of a strategic plan, but I thought I would share.
We all enjoy a little competition. On Tuesday, our Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair was able to compete head-to-head with the Las Vegas Review Journal Job Fair. By all indications, Opportunity Boulevard was the winner in this battle. A few ’spies’ were able to visit the RJ’s event and reported back that attendance was ‘beyond’ light and employers were so disappointed that all but three of them broke down their booths an hour before the job fair was scheduled to end.
Of course we celebrated. But unfortunately there was another loser in this competition…..the jobseeker. And at the end of the day, that is why we are in business – “to serve the jobseeker.” If we lose their trust or confidence, they do not come back. And if they do not return, we are not able to serve our other customer (the one that pays us), the employer.
Well, on Tuesday there were surely some upset jobseekers that attended both events looking for a room full of employers who had jobs to offer during these disparaging times. Yes, those that attended the Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair were able to see more employers and had access to well over 14,000 jobs in Las Vegas. But, there were a few employers that chose to attend the RJ job fair rather than ours. And those employers were also offering real jobs that jobseekers were looking for. Maybe only a few hundred jobs…but nonetheless, jobs that are so desperately needed right now.
And the other jobseekers, those that attended the RJ job fair only to find a few employers offering real jobs, mixed in with vendors looking to sell products (including the RJ selling video resumes) and non-employment offerings, went home to their families and friends and shared their anger. And now (to them), ‘job fairs are a waste of time.’ Unfortunately, they do not differentiate between the two promoters because they do not know different. This negativity surely does not help the industry, nor the economy. We all need to get these jobseekers back to work. We all benefit from it.
I don’t like seeing unhappy, or discouraged, jobseekers. Although I truly enjoyed beating the RJ, I wish we could have avoided the competition for the sake of the jobseekers. For they were the unfortunate losers in this battle. They went home without jobs.
On May 19, 2009, our Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair will go head-to-head with the Las Vegas Review Journal’s event. Our event will be held at the exclusive Green Valley Ranch Resort & Spa. The RJ will be at the Eastside Cannery.
As all of you know, we take great pride in the quality of event we produce and, more importantly, the quality of jobseeker we attract. When we entered into the career fair business a few years back, we assembled a powerhouse of partners including Recruiting Nevada, Nevada Broadcasters Association (All Radio and Television Stations in Nevada), LasVegasSun.com, Las Vegas Weekly, In Business, Home News, Las Vegas Relocation Guide, AARP and Green Valley Ranch.
Arguably, our events are second to none. Our staff goes above the call of duty to ensure every employer and jobseeker receives the utmost customer service and leaves the event ‘beyond’ satisfied. It requires more investment, focus, time and energy on our part – but it assures that we put on a first-class event. We even feed our exhibitors a sit-down lunch at China Spice prior to the career fair and allow them to unwind with the other exhibitors after the event at the Drop Bar in Green Valley Ranch.
Our list of participating employers for this event speaks for itself. We attract the ‘top employers’ in Las Vegas because we attract the best candidates. You will see a heavy concentration of health care, education, government and technology companies. Why? Because of the high volume of professionals we attract from other markets looking to move to Las Vegas. We already have nearly 500 of these out-of-market professionals flying to Las Vegas on their dollar to attend. Additionally, we have nearly 2,000 pre-registered jobseekers already, and our real marketing efforts towards jobseekers do not even kick in until next week. We expect over 5,000 of the best and brightest to be in attendance.
We want to make sure that this event (May 19th) is ‘over the top’ and prove that Opportunity Boulevard is the leading champion of job fairs in Las Vegas. Although our early bird special expired on Monday, earlier this week…… if you email me directly at Doug [at] RecruitingNevada.com, I will extend the $100 discount until Friday, May 1, 2009. If you are not personally hiring, but know of a colleague that is….please pass this along to them and I will extend the same discount. I assure you – if you (or they) have never been to an Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair — you will never attend one of the other Las Vegas Job fairs again.
The $100 off Early Bird Registration discount will expire on Monday, April 20th, 2009 for the upcoming Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair on Tuesday, May 19th. Register now to take full advantage of the early bird discount.
Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair
Exclusively held at Green Valley Ranch Resort, Spa and Casino.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
12:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Register today and receive $100 off.
As an added bonus we have added career seminars for job seekers to attend throughout the day to assist them in their career search:
If you are interested in participating on one of the panels or have a seminar that would be of interest to the job seeker please call 702-240-4100 for more information.
