I missed the second weekend (August 8-9) at NY, because I flew to the Texas Renaissance Festival to partake in their hiring fair. Woo Hoo!!! It was *amazing*. I can't believe I didn't do it sooner. At TRF, prospective employees were seated in The Globe Theatre audience, and at 9am, the Vendor Coordinator made a presentation, which included introducing show staff. Then the Entertainment Director gave a great pep-talk about how the workers at the festival are setting the scene and the mood of the illusion, and are, in fact, an important part of maintaining the atmosphere that our guests are expecting. Then each of the employers who were looking to hire were given 5 minutes on stage in which to describe their work-culture, shop themes, and specify what they were looking for in employees. One of my competitors stood up and said she was only looking for people fluent in French or German. I'm pretty sure she actually found people qualified. We all announced where we would be located to take applications as part of our presentation. This meant we got to go wait for applicants that actually had an intention of working at our specific shops, rather than just randomly hoping to work somewhere at the festival. It was marvelous.
I was hiring for my Scottish Bakery, and for The Hubby's Spanish-themed fruit shops. I had 56 applicants, for 24 positions, so I really got to be particular. The Scottish booth employees will begin their dialect classes this week. Today I'm organizing everyone's paperwork, and making an information packet for festival management, so that the photo-IDs for the festival can be produced before I get back to Texas.
