By Celia Bernhardt | cbernhardt@queensledger.com
State Senator Joseph Addabbo held his annual job fair at Resorts World Casino on Friday, with over 60 vendors looking to hire.
The Queens Chamber of Commerce worked in partnership with Addabbo’s office and Resorts World, sourcing vendors and promoting the event. Industries tabling around the room ranged from government agencies like the Department of Transportation to nonprofits to banking, finance and realty.
“I love this event,” Addabbo said. “I think the best opportunity for an elected official is to find either their constituents, or anyone, a job—and especially post-pandemic, when people are struggling to provide for themselves or their family.”
“When we’re planning this, the theme or the focus is whoever walks in that door, no matter what their background is or what their skill level is, they should be able to find a job today,” he continued. “So managerial, secretarial, high-end, low-end—doesn’t matter.”
Resorts World themselves were looking to recruit, with a table set up alongside the dozens of others in the banquet hall.
“We’re very excited to host it—kind of on-turf advantage,” Resorts World Recruiter Kelly McGuire said. “We’re [hiring] for admin positions, management positions, casino-specific, IT, hotel, kind of everything we have to offer.”
McGuire said job fairs like this one are “lifesaving” as a recruiter.
“You get to kind of speak face to face, I get to understand the application process better as a recruiter,” she said. “It’s good to kind of understand what everyone’s going through, what they’re looking for, the challenges that are out there.”
McGuire and colleague.
Carly Fitz-Henley, Real Estate Specialist at New York’s Department of Transportation, also appreciated the event.
“It kind of gets our name out there,” Fitz-Henley said. “You know, people only see the construction that’s happening, and the congestion because of the construction. But when we sit down and explain why we’re doing certain projects, they have more knowledge of what our role is.”
Addabbo said that hosting such a large job fair had inspired his decision to sponsor a different kind of event, as well.
“You’ll see the diverse people here, young and all that—but we do a separate senior job fair in the spring. Because seniors said to me, ‘we like your job fairs, but we feel intimidated by the 20- and 30-somethings. So out of this, we do our senior-only—it’s much smaller—job fair in the Spring.”
By 11 am, approximately 100 job-seekers had come to peruse the recruiting tables. The event began an hour earlier, at 10 am.
Still, Addabbo said he wasn’t quite satisfied with the turnout.
“We used to do this here, and we used to have the line around the block,” the Senator said. “It’s so disheartening to see fewer people show up to job fairs because a lot of people want to stay home, a lot of people want to work remotely. But I will not stop doing this…if I can help even five people, it’s worth it.”
