The Cyprus NGO fair was visited by over 5000 people on 24th September 2022 and was considered to be a very successful event for youth and for the promotion of different activities from 82 different NGOs in Cyprus. It was a great opportunity for us, OTI, to promote the GO Remote project and the future training courses of the project and to undertake a speed dating session.
Event:
Many people visited our stall at the NGO fair where we discussed the Go Remote project, provided information and a QR Code for people to visit the site, and register for training courses. We collected a lot of information of people interested and will follow this up with calls and emails to invite them to the local trainings we will offer.
Speed Dating:
A total of 8 recruiters representing several companies were available for the NGO Fair, where we booked 5-minute slots allowing interested job seekers to talk with the recruiters. Job seekers registered their interest based on the placements available for each recruiter, and we allocated times for the speed dating sessions.
We received a total of 268 registrations, of which only 214 showed up for the speed dating sessions with the recruiters. The speed dating was conducted in such a way to see if the recruiters were interested in inviting the job seekers for an interview and to submit their CVs to them.
Next steps:
We have invited all candidates to workshops/training sessions to help them improve their CVs and prepare for the interview, this will be done by our trainers and mentors that started on Tuesday 27th September and will run through October.
Concerns:
We have focused a lot on Digital media, as this is a growing market and the demand for them should increase in the near future, yet the placements available at this time are for different fields and thus bring us to a point of having to re-evaluate the training modules we will offer on a local level. It is still uncertain as to what training the candidates will need, and what the employers will demand from them and us.
Candidates/Job Seekers:
Based on the information collected the majority of candidates were holders of a bachelor’s degree, and some with a Master’s degree. All the candidates are NEETs, of which the majority finished their degrees in the last 16 months.
Although we were aware of the impact of the NGO fair and we had some rough estimates of the employer demands, we did not anticipate that there would be such great success. We estimate that some 100 NEETs ages between 22 and 29 could get employed within the next 3 weeks, putting a huge burden on us to ensure we have the mentoring capabilities to assist all the participants who need it. We have scheduled 2 workshops per day, with a maximum capacity of 30 people, for the CV and Interview workshop. 4 Mentors have scheduled individual meetings with participants starting from Monday 26th September until the interview dates are completed. To be able to facilitate more people in this small window, mentors have allocated a maximum of 1 hour per participant for one-on-one time and then additional time for group meetings to ensure all participants receive mentoring before their interviews. Additional mentoring time is also scheduled should the participants be offered the job placements.