TORY JOHNSON, the owner of Women for Hire, has been running job fairs in 10 of America’s largest cities for the last decade, and during that time she has never had more than 2,000 people come to the events. Last Tuesday, at a little after 3 p.m., after the last person had checked in at her latest job fair at the Sheraton Manhattan, she showed me the counter she uses to keep track of attendance: 5,103.
“Never,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing ever like this before.” Many of the women and men (she opened the event to men for the first time) had waited over two hours on the sidewalk in 20 degree temperature, or close to minus-7 centigrade, for the chance to mill through a ballroom, push to the front of a line at one of the 40 employer booths, hand a rep a résumé, maybe get a minute of face time and collect a business card or two.
“Very humbling,” said Pat Gericke, 61, of Manhattan who has had a successful interior design business for 20 years that suddenly went dead last fall. “I never thought I’d be at one of these.”