Fairness of Job Fairs: How Race and Gender Influence Relational Opportunities among Early Career Job-Seekers

A great deal of research has documented relational deficits faced by various social groups as they look for jobs, and that disadvantages in job-seeking accrue to these groups as a result of these relational disadvantages. One of the ways scholars argue that relational deficits can be addressed is by giving members of historically disadvantaged groups relational opportunities, or the chance to socially interact with insiders—i.e. workplace employees—in organizations. In this article, we examine ways to address relational deficits by studying a workplace practice argued to yield this chance: job fairs. We develop theoretical arguments about the ways job fair practices are structured that may or may not yield relational opportunities to members of historically disadvantaged groups. We then employ a novel design to study the job fair setting by collecting over 4,000 observations of in-person realized and potential interactions between job-seekers and employees (i.e. insiders) at two universities. We find evidence that although there are elements of job fairs that, by design, should yield relational opportunities to those historically without them, there are various reasons job fairs do the opposite for racial and gender minorities. We end with a discussion of the ways our study contributes to a greater understanding of workplace inequality, social networks, as well as labor market and career mobility.