It’s not your typical job fair. There’s a steady flow of beer from Brooklyn Brewery, thumping music on the speakers and liberal use of the word “awesome” as companies with sassy titles like Flurry and Totsy court young job seekers.
In the networking lounge, the tea purveyor Rishi serves up organic blueberry rooibos, a game of pingpong is in progress and the founders of some of Silicon Alley’s hottest startups are sharing tales of how their companies grew from ideas sketched out on the backs of napkins. Later there would be an after-party.
This was the scene last Friday at the Silicon Alley Talent Fair in Chelsea, where around 100 city-based technology, Internet commerce and social media firms gathered to fill hundreds of open positions.
Which is another way this was not your typical job fair — talent was in high demand. While in other industries job seekers are desperate for anyone willing to scan their resumes, in NYC’s startup sector, the tables are turned.
“This is the one teeny hiring sector where there’s unbelievable demand. These guys can’t find enough people,” says entrepreneur Tarek Pertew, explaining why he and a few buddies held the first Silicon Alley Talent Fair last summer, and brought it back for an encore.
“Finding talented product and engineering people in the city is tough right now,” agrees Joe Ciarallo, a VP at Buddy Media, which provides social enterprise software. He and other managers say the fair offers a chance to connect with the talent they covet.
Instead of relying on ads to attract job seekers, the fair’s organizers used guerilla tactics, and an invite-only policy.
“We hit the phones, we hit Facebook and Twitter to get the word out to exactly the right people,” says Pertew.
It’s not only tech geeks companies were after — those who want to flee Wall Street and Fortune 50 firms were in demand, too.
“We need people who have worked with large volumes of transacations, managed large projects, large data centers and large infrastructures,” says Eduardo Frias of the high-end flash sales retailer Ideeli, whose reps were easily identified at the event by their bright red baseball shirts.
Fully half the participating companies made a hire from the last job fair, says Pertew, who hoped this one would yield a similar figure.