Job seekers turn out at fair
By Susan Hooper
Advertiser Staff Writer
For job seekers and employers in today's tentative economy, the operative word is flexibility.
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser
That's the message that came through at yesterday's WorkForce 2002 job fair, held at the Neal Blaisdell Center.
Deven Matayoshi, 19, talks over some of the job possibilities with 19-year-old Gina Giang. Both Kane'ohe residents attended the WorkForce 2002 job fair held yesterday at the Neal Blaisdell Center.
The effects of the Sept. 11 attacks are still rippling through Hawai'i, causing workers to consider jobs in new fields and employers to take a second look at candidates with backgrounds different from their ideal applicant.
"You have to be open right now, because it's so bad," said Gary Uyeno, 47, of McCully, a hair stylist who was laid off three months ago. "You have to take what you can get now until something turns up."
With the state unemployment rate running at 4.4 percent, the job fair yesterday drew about 4,200 job hunters representing a broad spectrum of the state's work force — about the same number as last year, job-fair organizers said.
Among them were recent high school, trade school and college graduates; homemakers returning to the job market after years away; tourism industry veterans looking to switch careers; white-collar workers whose jobs disappeared; and many with a new interest in the military.
"It's more than I anticipated — it's a constant flow," Sergeant First Class Mark Shiraishi, a marketing and advertising representative with the Hawai'i Army National Guard, said of the number of fair goers who visited his booth. "And people are stopping. People in the past would just walk by."
Norma McDonald, O'ahu branch manager with the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations' Workforce Development Division, said the new flexibility of job-hunters showed in the number of professionals who attended the job fair this year.
"We don't typically attract the higher-end (candidates)," she said of the engineers, Web designers and other white-collar workers who came for help to the job fair's resume center. "They do their searches elsewhere. But they may have tapped out their other resources."
The number of college graduates this year also seemed a bit higher than last year, job fair organizers said. That may be because on-campus recruiting has dropped and grads are forced to look elsewhere for job leads, McDonald said.
The annual job fair, billed as Hawai'i's largest, attracted 90 employers, organizers said. It was sponsored by Hawaii Business College, Altres Staffing, Success Advertising and O'ahu WorkLinks, a city-state coalition whose mission is to help workers find jobs.
Keanu Lyau, 39, a Heald College student graduating in two months, made plans to switch careers after 18 years as a banquet waiter.
"Now that I'm getting older, my body is telling me an office job would be nice," he said of his decision to enter the business software applications program at Heald.
Lyau, who was temporarily laid off from his on-call waiter job after Sept. 11, called the job market in his new field "tough," both because of the volume of recent graduates and because salaries generally are higher on the Mainland.
Lyau said he would like to stay in Hawai'i, but will do that only "if I can find a job — and if the pay is there so I can support myself without having to work two jobs too hard."
Employers at the fair said they saw many candidates looking to move from one industry to another because of economic circumstances. But even those hoping to stay in the same field should be prepared to make adjustments, employers advised.
"I still think we're in tough times because there were so many people affected (by Sept. 11)," said Velina Haines, vice president of human resources with Aston Hotels & Resorts, the only hotel firm at the fair. "It's picking up in pockets of different industries, and I think the job seeker today really does have to be flexible.
"They need to keep an open mind about being flexible with their availability ... in order for them to be a viable candidate. Other things are perhaps taking a step sideways — backwards, if you will — in order to move forward, because if you're really, really looking for employment you have to be open-minded as to what kind of skills, knowledge and experience do I have and what could be transferrable to different jobs or even outside of the industry where I used to work."
Reach Susan Hooper at 525-8064 or shooper@honoluluadvertiser.com.
