Guess Who’s Hiring? State Fairs

It seems like I’ve been hearing a lot about state fairs lately.  Puf over at Human Resources Pufnstuff has been writing about it over at his blog.  Just last week he wrote a great post about the Minnesota State Fair called ‘Friday Fun- Food on a Stick’.   I’ve also seen quite a few tweets about people attending their state fairs.  @HR_Minion (one of our favorite HR bloggers over at her site, The HR Minion) also went to the Minnesota fair and tweeted and shared twitpics during her visit.  So why all the fuss about state fairs lately?

State fairs are a fun and relativly low-cost trip people can take close to home.  It’s a way to see the best of what your state has to offer from food to crafts to livestock.  And of course, there are the rides.  Many of the state fairs are seeing an incrase in attendance and they attribute it to the fact that while the economy is down and people are not taking extravagant vacations, they are visiting locations within their states.  State fairs are seeing another benefit from the down economy- an overabundance of applicants for their temporary positions.  MSNBC posted an article called “State Fairs Hiring and Seeing Lots of Applicants ‘ that gives some good examples of people who have lost their high-paying jobs and are now scrambling to take jobs at their state fair. 

Are you seeing this in your area?  Does your city have skilled workers that are resorting to temporary positions in order to make ends meet?  Or, are you starting to see an uptick in the skilled workers who are getting back to work?

Throw me some comments so we can see where the jobs are and where we still need to pull together and help find people jobs.