Thousands of job seekers attended the event, headlined by local startup Bandana, and many left with promising leads. But some said that ageism and other barriers were making it difficult find stable work.
The Brooklyn Bridge to Employment job fair, hosted by St. Francis College, featured over 40 employers and more than 1000 attendees. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Zawadzinski
By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com
A Ukrainian refugee looking to work as a taekwondo instructor. A professor and his fashion designer sister. An ex-receptionist commuting all the way from Nassau.
At a recent career fair in downtown Brooklyn, co-sponsored by the job aggregation platform Bandana and the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, over one thousand unemployed New Yorkers came looking for an alternative to the ‘black hole’ of sending resumes online — and many left pleasantly surprised.
Economists say that some degree of unemployment is a sign of a healthy economy, but even as the city’s economy grows, large swaths of its residents struggle to find work. Just over 216,000 people are currently unemployed in New York City, including roughly 118,000 Brooklynites, and searching for listings virtually can feel futile when the majority of applications are discarded by AI-based screening programs before they reach a human’s desk.
The ‘Brooklyn Bridge to Employment’ fair, hosted by St. Francis College on January 9, assembled over 40 employers to speak with job seekers one-on-one, running the gamut from the Flatbush Food Coop to SUNY Downstate. A wide range of sectors were out in force: for three hours, a steady stream of attendees clumped around the tables of the Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn SolarWorks, banks like Chase and Wells Fargo, the FDNY, Maimonides Medical Center, New York Life, and The City Tudors, among others.
The event doubled as a promo for Bandana, a Williamsburg-based startup launched in 2024 which bills itself as a more user-friendly, local competitor to behemoths like Glassdoor and Indeed. A chief concern is transparency, so users can view postings on an interactive map with commute times, alongside estimated take-home pay and benefits. And in a testament to the company’s crowd-sourced ethic, several of the site’s features were culled from conversations with attendees at previous career fairs.
J.C. Campbell, a design professor, said the fair was both ‘warm’ and productive — he found two companies to follow up with. Photo: Jack Delaney
“Three job fairs ago, someone mentioned subways,” said Bandana CEO and co-founder Tim Makalinao, who was helping with the event’s pop-up photo booth. “So we added transportation filters.”
Makalinao said that the tool was gaining traction, in part due to savvy social media strategy — he hazarded that most of the attendees at the St. Francis College fair had been drawn from TikTok and Instagram. Bandana’s unconventional business model seems to be working, too: the platform displays all the jobs it receives from employers, eschewing the traditional model in which sites charge for each listing. Instead, employers can pay to boost their listing to the top of the scrum.
In its latest update, the site has started to provide free tax assistance, and Makalinao indicated that more features were in the works.
While he wasn’t very familiar with Bandana, J.C. Campbell, a graphic design professor who had recently resigned, was enthusiastic about the career fair itself. “I found two companies,” he said, “I’m definitely gonna be reaching out to the [People Helping People] nonprofit, because they have a similar mindset to me. They teach people financial literacy and entrepreneurship, and that’s something I’m big on.”
Campbell’s sister had sent him an ad for the event on Instagram, and at first he’d dragged his feet. “Oh man, I’m going to another school job fair,” he joked. But he was glad he had come. “This doesn’t feel like a traditional job fair,” he said. “It’s very warm.”
Tim Cecere, president of St. Francis College, agreed with Campbell. “I couldn’t believe the turnout,” he said. “It wasn’t like these dull job fairs you see sometimes, where everyone looks lost. People were talking to one one another — there was this sense of community and belonging, which is wonderful.”
Although the overall atmosphere was one of excitement, the event also placed into sharp relief the barriers that many would-be workers face in trying to get a foot in the door.
Stormy Gabriel, a Flatbush resident, was worried about how she would support herself once her time in a senior workforce development program ran out. Photo: Jack Delaney
“I’ve been applying for everything,” said Carolyn Nagin, who said she had been fired from her job as a baker at Liedl, the German-owned grocery chain, in December. “I apply for jobs on Indeed, and they never call me, and I feel like I have to do the instigating, I have to call them and say, ‘Hey, I applied for this position.’ And I feel like sometimes they can discriminate, because I’m an older woman.”
Stormy Gabriel, a 61-year-old Flatbush resident, agreed that ageism made the mountain of finding steady employment even harder to climb. She had joined the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP), a workforce development initiative run by the disability advocacy organization Easterseals, right before the pandemic hit. For the past few years, it had provided her with financial support and relatively stable work.
But her term in the program was now timing out, and she was unsure whether the nonprofit in which she had been placed would move her to its payroll now that SCSEP’s sponsorship was ending, even as a part-time hire. She had begun to cast a wider net, she said, but it was hard to stay optimistic.
“I’ve been to quite a few job fairs,” Gabriel said, “and it seems that most of [them] are mainly for younger people.”
Yet despite the deck stacked against many job seekers, attendees were largely positive about their experience at the fair. Nagin stayed for two hours, and said that after her experience online she was grateful for the chance to talk to prospective employers in person. “Everybody was really nice and helpful,” she noted. “They should have more events.”
