Job Fair in the Minors

In order to hire game day staff members, most MiLB teams that I know of host a job fair to interview lots of candidates in a short period of time. My team was no different. Those who worked in departments that would be using game day staff members/were in charge of the game day staff members all sat at little tables around the U of our ballpark. The crowd was held in our clubhouse as they filled out their applications and waited for their interviews.

The job fair did NOT go how I was expecting it to, and it made me realize that I should make a list of things to do and not to do at an MiLB job fair based on what happened at ours.

1) Do not come to the job fair looking like you haven't showered in two weeks, and havent changed clothes in the same amount of time. Baseball is an outdoors job over the summer meaning it gets hot. We are already going to be smelly, we won't hire someone who is that bad to begin with because we'll be having to smell you all season long.

2) Do not try to schmooze the lowly front office staffers who are handing out the applications to you. We get hundreds of applicants and have absolutely no say in who gets hired. The only people that we are going to remember are the ones that should not want to be remembered as it's for a bad reason. We don't talk to those interviewing about who we thought was best.

3) Do not come to a ballpark and not know who plays there. You don't need to know everything about the team, all the policies, or anything like that. Asking us, however, what the team name is, and if this is a job fair for the entire county is not very impressive.

4) Do bring a resume or a letter of recommendation or something to make you stand out. Of the 200-250 people we had at the job fair, only a handful stated at least to us that they had a resume to bring to their interviewer. It made them look prepared for the job even though it's only for a game day position.

5) Do not assume you will be getting a front office position from being a game-day staff member. This really doesn't happen. I believe in my team's history we have had 1 game day staff member become front office staff.

I guess that's my list for now. It was a crazy job fair and made me realize just how lucky I am to have a job in these times.