OAKWOOD — For people like Steven Girardeau, the Gainesville State College Spring Job Fair is a great place to find a new job.
Girardeau, a business major, says his current job is not very flexible to his class schedule.
"It kind of feels dead-end, and they’re not real flexible with their hours, so I figured this was the best place to get it all taken care of at once," said Girardeau, who walked around Gainesville State’s Student Activities Building during the Spring Job Fair Tuesday afternoon.
The job fair exposed students and area residents to about 25 employers from the region.
Some employers at the fair, such as the
Arby’s Corp., required little more than enthusiasm from their applicants. But there were others that required a good driving record and clean criminal history, and performed various lie-detector tests and psychological and physical exams of their employees, like the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, which has 21 open positions.
"It takes about 21 applications to get one person," said Jim Harvey, a deputy who represented the Cherokee agency at Tuesday’s fair. "Some people apply for whatever, they think they want to do this. Some people apply knowing that they don’t meet the qualifications. And then there’s some really good, genuine people who would make good law enforcement people."
Girardeau said he might be successful with Primerica, a financial company that helps middle-income families get out of debt and sells term life insurance, according to its Web site. Girardeau had scheduled a meeting with associates from the company later in the evening.
Ian Coyne is not a student at Gainesville State, but he still brought his resumes to the job fair. The Winder resident found out about the job fair through an advertisement in The Paper, a Hoschton-based newspaper, and thought it might be a good opportunity to find a job in his specialty, information technology.
Coyne said he found the staffing agencies, Etcon and Spherion, that were present at the fair to be the most helpful in his job search Tuesday.
"I went through more of the head-hunters, job-staffing agencies, than more of the other people," Coyne said. "The only place so far that I’ve seen that was IT was the Bank of America."