Employers Gather to Recruit Workers for Chicago Foodservice Jobs

Talk of a recession has made many in Chicago and elsewhere more cautious about the money they spend. This takes a particular toll on the retail, tourism, hospitality and food services industries. Instead of eating out, people are electing to stay home and cook, which may employers to have fewer Chicago foodservice jobs to offer.

That being said, those looking for a position in this industry should consider attending the Multicultural Foodservice and Hospitality Alliance's (MFHA) annual conference on August 12th. More than 30 well known names from the industry will be at the Chicago Fairmont Hotel in hopes of finding new workers to fill their current staff vacancies. Between the hours of 10 am and 3 pm, these employers will be available to let job seekers know what a career with their establishment can do for them.

Some of the establishments attending in hopes of recruiting new workers include: Gordon Food Service, ARAMARK, Chipotle, Sodexo, Buca di Beppo, Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants, Denny's, CAMPBELL SOUP, Outback Steakhouse, Potbelly Sandwich Works, Heartland Food Corp/Burger King, Save-A-Lot and Potawatomi Bingo Casino. These businesses will be highlighting the different career paths an employee can take and what each positions entail.

Whether a veteran in the industry or a new-comer, those looking for a job in the industry might find it beneficial to stop by. Many find that it is often easier to get a job in a setting such as a career fair for several different reasons. For starters, Employers attending an event like this have immediate openings they are trying to fill. Another good point about industry specific career fairs is the fact that job seekers are given a chance to leave a good impression before an official interview.

In order to this, those looking for a job in the industry should dress as they would if they were actually going to a company to apply for a job. It is also a good idea to take copies of your resume with you. Many employers will accept these on site, so be prepared to hand it out.

This event will also serve to highlighting diversity in the workplace. Host MFHA is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the benefits of a culturally diverse workplace to both workers and employers.

"Leading companies in the hospitality industry know that a diverse workforce is key to successfully fulfilling the employment needs for our hotels and restaurants," said MFHA president Gerry Fernandez. "This career fair is a great opportunity for matchmaking--and to introduce the wide variety of hospitality careers to candidates."

The event will take place at Chicago Fairmont Hotel located at 200 N Columbus Drive. For more information visit www.psijobfair.com/mfha

Jobs in Chicago

Sales jobs can range anywhere from retail to newspaper advertisements. A person working with retail sales can range in level from a cashier to a manager. A Sales Associate (aka account executive) with a newspaper will sell the advertisements, usually with a commission hoping to maintain a contract and growing relationship with the client.

If you are doing the actual sales pitch, very strong social skills are needed, as well as a callous to rejection. No matter what you say or do you cannot make someone buy something, only do your best to persuade them. A creative mind is advantageous. With that being said, the sales industry can sometimes be unpredictable. You will find it comes in waves, depending on outside circumstances such as the time of the year and activity going on in the area.

A trusted website for jobs in Chicago, Illinois is www.chicagojobs.com featuring “Sales” under Chicago’s top industries.

A Yahoo sponsored job search engine, www.hotjobs.com is free and easy to use. You can search by location, industry, using a keyword, or even by the required experience level using the Advanced Search. As of May 18, 2007, there are almost two thousand sales jobs in and around the Chicago area to choose from.

Another strong web page that is exclusively for finding (or posting) a sales job in Chicago, Illinois would be www.salesrecruiterschicago.com. They are interested in getting to know you on a more personal level.

None of these sites charge any money to submit a resume or search for job openings.

Chicago Area Jobs

If you're a Chicago headhunter, human resource manager, or looking for Chicago area jobs, you have one of the most varied of local resources in the United States.

The Big Three recruiting Web sites - Monster, Careerbuilder and Yahoo! HotJobs - offer several thousand job listings each in the Chicago area. Here is where Careerbuilder can excel through Tribune Company’s partial ownership, providing co-posting with the Chicago Tribune. Employers who advertise their job openings in the Tribune also do so on Careerbuilder, with the opportunity to choose access to its voluminous resume database. In the last seven days alone well over 3000 jobs were posted on the Tribune / Careerbuilder sites.

The Chicago Sun-Times, the "other" daily, is part of Sun Times News Group, which includes dozens of other daily and weekly papers in the area. The Daily Southtown, for example, covers the south suburbs of metro Chicago, while Suburban Chicago Newspapers advertises jobs in the Chicago suburbs of Batavia, Plainfield, St. Charles, Wheaton, Fox Valley, and 13 other communities. Pioneer Press, a weekly Sun-Times publication, offers zoned Chicago job hunts or job postings in the employer’s choice of Chicago central, Northwest Chicago, Lakeshore, West Chicago or south Chicago's The Doings.

With a Sun-Times online recruitment ad package a recruiter can cover Chicago center and all the suburbs for those hard-to-fill jobs that require a broader reach, or neighborhood-focused advertising for semi-skilled or unskilled jobs. On the Daily Southtown site alone there are 1260 current job postings.

Another highly-focused local recruitment product, ChicagoJobs.com, is the brainchild of Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications, a Chicago-based three-generation family-owned recruitment advertising agency. What Joe and Joe Shaker Jr. began in 2003 has now expanded to about 15,000 job postings a month, through a partnership with 17 newspapers in the 11-county metropolitan Chicago area.

When a Grundy County employer posts metro Chicago jobs in the local Morris Daily Herald, for example, she or he pays $75 to repeat the ad on ChicagoJobs.com. The site also provides a resume database, company profiles, and banner ads. So successful has ChicagoJobs.com been for area newspapers, recruiters and job candidates that seven papers in Rhode Island approached the firm in 2005 to create RIJobs.com. Other offshoots include ILCareers.com and CTJobs.com in Connecticut.

Craigslist.org, another job hunt choice, currently displays more than 17,000 positions on its Chicago site. Here employers post for free, although it's a very basic word ad and not well policed. Job seekers should realize, therefore, that when it comes to the legitimacy of the job offerings on Craigslist it’s definitely buyer beware.

Job seekers have an excellent "one stop shop" for Chicago jobs in Oodle.com. This directory boasts 15 million classified listings from 60,000 sites. Chicago is one of the major search regions, and accessible from its home page. Today there are more than 71,000 Chicago area jobs listed on Oodle, easily narrowed down by zip code, category and keyword.

When you need to find or fill Chicago jobs you clearly have many local and expanded options.