If you’re at all like me, you probably went by the university career centre once or twice when you were in school and thought to yourself “why is this place even around?” Their career database was hopelessly out of date, and the only service they seemed to offer was giving you a computer to update your resume. They knew nothing about your particular line of study or industry, but told you to dress nice for interviews, and held career fairs where pretty much only the army showed up to exhibit.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, we’re hiring like mad right now. Since there are two universities and a college in Ottawa, we try to maintain good relationships with the schools so they’ll send the best and brightest our way. So I called one of the schools, one of which I am an alumnus, and offered up our CEO to talk to graduating classes in computer science, multimedia and the like. She was very excited to hear this.
Then she told me it would be $250.
I was extremely surprised by this. Here I was, offering up the CEO of a major company – certainly the largest agency in the city – to speak directly to a graduating class of kids who would KILL to work at a place like Fuel, but probably think they have to leave the city to do it.
I asked, “is it not in your best interests to get your students hired?”
Of course, she said yes, but that all the other schools did it, so they did too. $250 is nothing, really. It doesn’t even fall outside of discretionary spending, but it’s the principle of having to pay to provide a public service. Sure, we get something out of it too, but I would have loved to have someone like Mike talk to ANY of my classes in university. It’s an incredible opportunity for these kids.
I changed tacks, just to see where this rule was coming from. “So, what if we do something that’s more geared at educating these kids about getting a job in the gaming industry – what they should be studying, what they should be putting in their portfolio?”
“That’s fine – we wouldn’t charge for that.”
“And if we mention at the end that we’re hiring?”
“Then we’d have to charge you $250.”
Having gone to this school, and having gotten absolutely nothing out of it in terms of building my career other than meeting a couple of professors in my industry, I was pretty aphalled at this. I’ve told a number of people about it since, and they all reacted with the same incredulity. Schools are not only not trying to help you get a job, they’re actively prohibiting it by charging companies to provide opportunities to their students.
I can’t think of a better example of uselessness.
