HHS fair brings 41 employers to campus

Nursing undergraduate students Adam Dustin and Lexi Barrett asked a variety of employers – including Covenant HealthCare – questions during the Health and Human Services career fair. Vanguard Photo | Matthew Hintz

Health and Human Services hosted 41 companies for its sixth Health and Human Services employment fair.

At the Nov. 7 fair, students were asked to bring at least 15 copies of their resumes to hand out to employers as they walked around.

Interim Associate Director Tom Barnikow said event planning began in July and did not stop until the morning of the fair.

“There is marketing and promotions, connecting with the employers, administrative tasks associated with collecting payments and collaborating with The Conference Center to get all of the logistics figured out,” he said.

Part of the process is networking with companies to decide which companies would be a good fit for this event, Barnikow said.

“Over the past few years, our office has built a robust network of employers that we connect with on a regular basis,” he said. “When we have events that we believe they would be a good fit for, we get in contact with them to see if they would be interested in attending. Many of the employers at our employment fairs attend multiple events that we facilitate throughout the academic year, so the relationship between the employer and the university grows stronger with each visit to campus.”

Barnikow said a few major companies attend the event every year.

“Some of the larger healthcare organizations in the Great Lakes Bay Region attend this event every year,” Barnikow said.

Those employers include Covenant HealthCare, McLaren Bay Region and MidMichigan Health Care.

Barnikow said that, each year, about 81 percent of the employers that attend end up interviewing at least one student from the fair. He said 59 percent of the employers end up hiring either a student or alumni who attended the fair.

One of the employers that attended was Munson HealthCare. Munson is a hospital based out of Traverse City. Munson attends the employment fair every year and has hired students before. The employer attended the fair this year to look for nurses willing to work in a more rural setting.

“Nursing is a big need, especially up north,” Munson Representative Tiffany Larson said. “We’re on the snowbelt, so we get a lot of snow. It’s a little bit more rural.”

Alyssa McMillan

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