How City Career Fair...And Most Job Fairs... Deceive You With False Advertising and Fake Promises!
- Profit
- Oct 10
- 9 min read
Job Fairs Have Devolved Into Little More Than Zombie Cattle Calls
Fall is not just about people geeking out about overpriced pumpkin spice lattes, fantasy football, or a never-ending Halloween season.
It’s also “Job Fair” season, as Corporate America gears up it’s hiring efforts for the all-important “4th Quarter”, also known as the Christmas shopping season. Also, much of Corporate America’s fiscal year budget refreshes mid-year, freeing up newly allocated money to hire new blood.
City Career Fair: A Case Study of Job Fairs At It’s Carnival Barking Worst
I went to City Career Fair as a clandestine jobseeker in October 2024 and March 2025 to see if job fairs have changed since I last worked one as a recruiter in 2020. City Career Fair’s email advertisement actually looked promising. Supposedly, per the City Career Fair flyer, jobseekers can expect the following big-ticket items:
Hundreds of jobs
Major employers
Career opportunities - Ex: NOT Primerica or Herbalife pyramid hustles
Face-to-face interviews
Featured industry pavilions - Tech engineering, banking, entertainment to name a few!
Virtual Career Fair options - Healthcare, High Tech, and Law Enforcement
America’s Very Best & Largest Career Fair
That’s a pretty packed event! Did City Career Fair deliver on their promises?
1. Employers Are Often Flaky
Based on City Career Fair’s enticing flyer, I was expecting a huge symposium of career hustle and bustle. Opportunities galore!
Maybe job fairs have come up since 2020?
Instead I saw no more than 12 employers (at best) in a small room - with about 2 of those employers “at lunch”.
Where were some of the big fish companies that were namedropped on the City Career Fair flyer, such as Louis Vuitton, Hilton, UCLA, or CBS-Radio?
Let’s put our thinking caps on… A) Either these companies were advertised without their knowledge. B) Past attending companies, whose names were pimped as social credibility to inflate a dud employer list, were added to the job fair flyer to make the job fair look like it’s popping off! C) These companies just decided to no show a job fair they spent hundreds or thousands of dollars to participate in. If you answered, “B”, you get get a cookie. "A" was a close 2nd, so you get a participation trophy! 2. The Jobs are BRUTAL Let’s be real. Few, if any, of the positions offered at a typical job fair are enticing, fun, 6-figure dream jobs. These are tough jobs that are totally unlike working at Google — with its nap pods, ping pong tables, and free snacks stashed in every cubbyhole. Sadly, City Career Fair was no different in prettying up their pigs with a whole lot of cheap lipstick. Don’t expect more than typical dead end jobs here, outside of government agency jobs; though few can endure their yearlong gauntlet of bureaucratic BS and inhospitable recruiting! Here are the job types represented at most job fairs, which is the same shlock offered by City Career Fair:
Governmental administrative jobs or Peace Officer jobs for city, county, state, and (before 2025) some federal agencies. Think: Fire Department, Probation, CA National Guard, US Border Patrol, City of Compton, U.S. Census, etc.
Police Officer jobs and security jobs
Staffing companies like AppleOne or Adecco looking for new jobseekers to bolster their candidate rolls for temporary or contract assignments
Local radio stations looking for street teamers, interns, or part-time gopher jobs
Insurance sales jobs like Aflac and State Farm
Multilevel marketing jobs or financial services jobs — that are primarily commission-based sales roles, such as Primerica
Bus driver
Reality Check # 1 - Why Most Job Fair Opportunities Are Undesirable Most of these so-called opportunities contain a glaring defect that makes them radioactive to the masses. Such jobs often involve sales quotas, low starting pay, little career advancement, terrible schedules, yearlong selection processes, or are temporary assignments. Since these jobs are undesirable, you also get treated poorly because employers know people only entertain these jobs out of sheer desperation. These are jobs people only take to get by and there’s no shame in that! I have worked minimum waged jobs during the Great Recession, so I understand sometimes “you got to get in, where you fit in.”
Still, nobody would mistake any of these opportunities as the “dream jobs” that dodgy companies like City Career Fair promote!
Hence, recruiters from these companies MUST come to live job fairs to “sell” these so-called opportunities to desperate jobseekers — to meet their quotas.
Bad or inconsistent work schedules (bus driver, security)
Low or primarily commission-based pay (radio street team, financial services, insurance sales)
High turnover rates (temporary admin work, staffing companies contract work)
Good and stable government jobs — but they have 6-months or longer selection processes that often involve invasive background investigations that few applicants can successfully pass. This can include written tests, physical fitness tests, credit checks, polygraph or voice stress tests, medical screening, psychological evaluations, and demand you jump through ALL these hurdles perfectly.
Oh, forget about salary, shift schedule, or site location negotiations with government agencies. It’s pretty much entry level fare, (maybe level II based on your education), and you accept whatever conditions offered, or kick rocks!
3. Lazy Recruiters There’s nothing more frustrating than standing in a crowded line and waiting for your target employer to get some good face time, only to get non-answers to your questions and told to “apply online” — which is tantamount to a resume black hole. Some will collect your resume and never read it. It will line their bird cage. Others know you are not a good fit, but will still have you apply online — only to humor you — out of cowardice. Or, to simply collect applications to hit some required metric to satisfy their boss. Few will actually interview you on the spot to pre-screen you, so you don’t need get gussied up in business attire.
Reality Check # 2 — Typical LA Fakeness at City Career Fair
Recruiters were friendly to my face, but after a few email exchanges — like with KABC Talk Radio and Enterprise — ghosted me after not following up with their promised deliverables or simply stopped answering my emails, respectively.
That said, this could be an “LA thing”, as for all of LA’s virtues, it has a well-earned reputation for flakiness. Still, I was promised interviews by City Career Fair, which didn’t occur.
4. Deceptive Advertising
City Career Fair was sure to bold “Major Employers” in their advertisement as a top attraction. Yet, their ad copy was purposefully very deceptive.
Next to “Top Employers Recruiting” — which is in a 50-point font size, is “Current and PAST Employers Include”, in 4-point font size — in which only an eagle after undergoing Lasik surgery could see!
Reality Check # 3: Classic Conflation Confusion to Hook You Wow, so City Career Fair intentionally wants jobseekers to conflate PAST employers with current employers to make it appear 40+ employers will be recruiting at this event. They wish they could get 40 paying employers for this sham of an event.
5. Overpromise, but Underdelivered
Did City Career Fair deliver on their ambitious promises?
As Stone Cold Steve Austin would say, “Oh, H*ll, No!”
There certainly weren’t hundreds of available jobs at either event.
The so-called major employers consisted mostly of government agencies. No Apple, Amazon, Facebook, NFL, Coca Cola, or other such advertised heavy hitters attended.
There were no interviews, except me getting interviewed City Career Fair.
I didn’t see any pavilions for healthcare, high tech, or law enforcement. I saw your basic booth set ups for law enforcement, but certainly no industry-centric pavilion with tons of competing options.
There were no virtual career fair options at this job fair, but City Career Fair had other dedicated virtual events listed on their website.
If this was “America’s Very Best & Largest Career Fair”, no wonder workers are disillusion from the job market.
I doubt she ever envisioned working as a radio street team intern for KIIS-102.7 FM while being eligible for AARP! Cool sunglasses though.
Conclusion — Avoid City Career Fair and Most Other Job Fairs — Unless You Are Completely Desperate!
Both Los Angeles City Career Fair “events” in the fall of 2024 and winter 2025 were totally not FOMO-inducing and a giant waste of time.
While City Career Fair shares the same pitfalls of other job fairs, such as:
1) They promote a significant group of employers that no show.
2) Most attending employers are hocking low wage and dead end jobs.
3) Most attending recruiters lazily refer you to apply for their website — and still eventually ghost you when you pepper them with “inconvenient” follow up questions.
City Career Fair is actually WORSE than other pathetic job fairs of a similar ilk for 3 additional reasons:
4) They overpromise and underdeliver in every area!
5) They have deceptive advertising that leads the untrained eye into believing there will be bigger and more employers attending.
6) Nonetheless, the what makes City Career Fair the “worst of the worst” is their branding is all pro-diversity and proudly flies that noble banner.
In reality, City Career Fair not only preys on the historically-marginalized population it purports to serve via wage theft, but they do the classic “bait-and-switch” with their marketing tactics and outright lie to get diverse candidates in the door.
City Career Fair Job Fair Final Review
As an attendee of City Career Fair’s Los Angeles-based events in October 2024 and March 2025, here’s the skinny:
The October 2024 West Hollywood job fair had less foot traffic than a lecture on the benefits of kale at a pizza festival. Parking was not free and West Hollywood is an expensive ticket trap. The best employer there was Jewish Vocational Services, which listed great opportunities, but don’t bother to apply to them — they ghosted me on multiple resume submissions.
The March 2025 Los Angeles event was held in a very small hotel conference room with primarily government agencies hiring — which often take at least 6 months to hire people, involves testing, and invasive background processes! FINAL WORD In a world where job hunting should be efficient and rewarding, job fairs often miss the mark. They’re overcrowded, filled with disinterested employers, and yield nothing but frustration and wasted time. Why waste your time and fuel to see flaky or lazy recruiters with brutal “opportunities” — when these same losers will direct you to apply online anyway? You rarely get interviewed on the spot and these field recruiters often have no input with hiring managers! Buttering them up is pointless. They have no stroke! Cut out the middle man and go straight to your laptop and apply without all the drama! Worst of all, corrupt recruiting event companies, such as City Career Fair — will lure you in with false advertising — that promises the world, yet can’t even deliver a pittance! So, the next time someone suggests attending a job fair, remember these reasons and consider skipping the circus. Your time — and sanity — are worth more than that. At least people have fun at the circus!
Avoid the cattle call of a job fair, unless you really need fast employment. Look up the attending employers, apply online, and save your dry cleaning money!
How does City Career Fair Prey on Their Diverse Workers?
I went undercover, worked for them, and was exploited by them, so I have firsthand knowledge of the treachery.
Multi-Part Expose on City Career Fair
Please check out a prior article, as I expose City Career Fair’s owners, diversity pimps and culture vultures — Neal William Morrison and his accomplice wife — Ashley Morrison — for their crimes against diversity AND CA employment law!
References and Sources Feel free to click on any of the hyperlinks included in this article to further research or read up on the referenced content that contributed this article.
Comments