Apparently companies are going to college career fairs again, and hiring. Well, maybe. According to an article by Josh Dawsey at Fortune:
After a two-year hiatus, major corporations are starting to hit college career-fair tables once again. Bank of America plans to offer 1,300 new graduates jobs in 2011, and Microsoft (MSFT) will visit more business schools, marking the first time the company has expanded its footprint since 2009.
Planned job offers for recent graduates are up 19.3% from 2010, according to a recent report from the National Association for Colleges and Employers. The study comes from self-reported data by hundreds of companies worldwide. Those gains are in sharp contrast to 2009, when hiring dropped more than 20% across the country from 2008.
This information is perhaps a little premature (it’s July; there are no college career-fair tables) but it certainly looks promising. If a significant portion of next year’s graduates can actually secure jobs at career fairs that would be a real sign that the recession is actually starting to abate.
Then again, these business predictions are notoriously unreliable. 2008 was the year that many American corporations essentially shut down hiring for recent college graduates. They did this because of the collapse of the real estate market; if you’d asked them a year before they most certainly would have said they were going to ramp up “planned job offers for recent graduates” too.
According to the article, major hiring will be for jobs in technology and engineering.
