Career counselors, employers meet
Published: June 19, 2009, 12:30 am
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The Eastern Association of Colleges and Employers brings career counselors of colleges and universities from the Eastern United States together with people whose job it is to hire their recent graduates.
The group is holding its annual convention this week at the Buffalo Marriott Niagara hotel in Amherst.
“It’s an opportunity for us to network, to share best practices,” said Dylan Schweitzer, group recruiting manager for the New York region of Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
Schweitzer and Dan Ryan, director of off-campus student relations for the University at Buffalo, are the conference chairmen. Some 230 people were registered to attend.
The group is attractive to Enterprise, Schweitzer said, because the current economic recession hasn’t stopped its need to hire new management trainees. The company is looking for college graduates, he said, but doesn’t limit itself to those from the business schools.
“We focus on business, communications, marketing,” he said. “But we hire all majors. It’s more important that they get a degree than what the degree is in.”
The president of the organization, Donna Cassell Ratcliffe, is director of career services at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Va. She said the job of being a college career counselor is made more difficult by the recession, but that some companies are still hiring. Those still in the market for her school’s graduates, she said, include information technology firms such as Microsoft and Yahoo!, as well as others looking to fill positions in their sales and customer service divisions.
At the same time she said, college job fairs aren’t attracting as many employers as they once did.
“Some of them are coming because they want to remain a name on campus, not because they have any jobs,” Ratcliffe said.
gpyle@buffnews.com
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