Records were broken and professional relationships were forged on Jan. 30 as Weber State University students took to the Shepherd Union’s ballrooms for WSU’s annual Spring Career & Internship Fair.
This year’s career fair saw a record number of students attend, with WSU Career Services citing a final count of 572 students who came to the event.
According to Mitchell Keahey, WSU Career Services’ events and promotional media specialist, an integral part of the career fair’s success this year was embracing a willingness to pioneer new approaches in marketing the event to students.
“We’ve dedicated more marketing dollars, more effort and incorporated more brand-new ideas towards marketing the career fair in the past year and a half than ever,” Keahey said.
Working toward the future, Keahey said he hopes to increase attendance numbers at WSU’s career fairs in the future to 1,000 or more students, and he is looking for new strategies to achieve that goal.
“I try to be maximalist in our approach to advertising to students,” Keahey said.
Keahey said his goal was to reach WSU students who are juggling busy lives and incentivize them to attend the career fair.
This year, Career Services spent $500 marketing the career fair to students through geo-fenced social media ads and other forms of advertisements like promotional A-frames set up around campus. Additionally, a brand-new Macbook was raffled off to students who interacted with employers at the event.
“I got like three emails about the fair,” Alexander Schott, a WSU computer science student who attended the fair, said. “I also like Handshake a lot, so it was nice to see exactly what positions the employers here are hiring for ahead of time.”
Another new innovation employed at the career fair this year was color-coded maps that outlined what employers were present and which colleges they were looking to hire new employees from.
“This is something that we’ve never done before,” Keahey said.
Keahey said the map was designed for students who had a limited amount of time to spend at the career fair, and the goal was to help those students maximize their time spent at the career fair.
While students remain the primary focus at Career Services, Keahey said he recognizes how important career fairs are to the employers who attend, and extensive efforts were made to reach out to employers from Logan to just south of Salt Lake City.
Fifty-six employers attended the career fair this year, highlighting a decrease in the number of employers present at the event in comparison to previous career fairs.
“Since 2022, we’ve seen a meaningful decline in the number of employers attending our events,” Keahey said. “Post-COVID, we’d have 75 to 95 employers attend our career fairs.”
However, while WSU’s career fairs have seen a decrease in the number of employers in attendance, attendance data from the past two spring career fairs suggest that WSU’s career fairs are experiencing an increase in student engagement.
According to WSU Career Services, the 2024 career fair saw a 75% year-over-year increase in student attendance, and employers at the event interacted with an average of more than 60 students throughout the event — indicating that student interest in career fairs at WSU is increasing.
“My message to employers is that they have a really great opportunity here,” Keahey said. “Weber State students are second to none when it comes to work ethic, and they have the opportunity to meet a lot of students at events like this who are willing to work hard for their company.”
Jennifer Calderon, talent acquisition lead for Associated Regional and University Pathologists Inc., commented positively about the inquisitive nature of the students she interacted with that day.
“Weber State students are driven, want to know what to work toward and are curious,” Calderon said. “We’ve met a lot of students from the majors we’re interested in, so the experience has been really fruitful.”
Keahey, who is a WSU alum, said he believes in the importance of career fairs on university campuses, and he hopes to continue to innovate his approach to organizing WSU’s career fairs in order to continue to maximize student engagement in the future.
“Personally, by not taking advantage of career fairs and the opportunities at Career Services while I was a student, I realized how hard it was to enter the job market in 2021,” Keahey said. “As somebody from the alumni side who’s working with students a little bit younger than me, I view it as a blessing and a fun opportunity to hook students up with those opportunities I feel like I didn’t have.”
