• by April 19, 2006

It's that time again.

Eager, soon-to-be college grads are hunting for their first jobs and out to score a position. On Friday, April 21, some 800 college students will get a chance to scope out opportunities in the interactive advertising sector at 212's second annual Interactive Advertising Career Day and Recruitment Fair.

The careers event, put on by 212, New York's interactive advertising club, is designed to attract college grads and some MBA students to jobs in the online sector including sales, media planning and buying, creative, marketing, account service, and more. The event, which gets underway at 9 a.m. on Friday at the Puck Building, features five panel discussions with industry professionals, on-site informational interviews, and ample time for networking.

"We want to give students the opportunity to network," says Lisa Utzschneider, sales director for Microsoft's MSN, which serves as the event's charter sponsor. "I think that all of the publishers and the agencies in the industry recognize how this medium is growing and scaling, and that for all of us to scale, we need a pool of talent and to educate both college and business students about online advertising and what a great career path it can be."

The event includes more than 25 booth sponsors--a mix of online publishers, agencies, portals, and technology vendors including Avenue A/Razorfish, Beyond Interactive, Carat Fusion, CheetahMail, CNET, Condé Nast, Datran Media, Efficient Frontier, Google, Horizon Media, IAC/Ask.com, Modem Media, NYTimes/About.com, Ogilvy, OMD, and Turner. New York Times Digital is the underwriting sponsor for the event. The event is free to students attending.

The program includes a how-to on resume writing and the art of interviewing. "People just soak up that information," notes Rich Knopke, director, eastern regional sales at Dow Jones Online, which includes the Wall Street Journal Online, MarketWatch, and Barron's Online. Another panel highlight: "A Day in the Life of a Digital Professional."

And, Knopke notes, there are two new panels this year. One, dubbed "Digital Luminaries," will feature Gordon Crovitz, executive vice president, Consumer Media Group, Dow Jones & Co.; Jim Warner, president-East, AvenueA/Razorfish; Betsy Morgan, senior vice president, CBS Digital; and John Montgomery, CEO Worldwide, MindShare Interaction. The luminaries will discuss their passion for the industry and look back at their career evolution. The other new panel will feature students who were hired last year from the career fair discussing their job search and experience working in the industry thus far.

At MSN, Utzschneider notes that most of the openings are for entry-level positions, typically on the sales side including customer service roles and sales support. "They're serving display and search customers, then they move on to account management or sales. We, and many of the publishers, are just growing so quickly that we're finding some great talent right out of the college market. We hire them, train them, educate them about the medium, and then they grow the company," she says.

The students attending the event come from all over the East Coast, but some travel from further away. Typically, they've completed at least one internship at a Fortune 500 company or an agency, and are finance, marketing, and business majors from solid schools. And surprisingly, salary is not the overriding factor: "The college students we've been hiring care more about the culture, the training resources, the work environment, career path, leadership opportunities, and how innovative our products are," Utzschneider says, adding, "It's a lot less about potential to earn."

By some accounts, U.S. digital marketing will grow from $12.5 billion in 2005 to $28.5 billion by 2010. "With that kind of growth in dollars, we need that kind of growth in bodies," Knopke says. "We need young, smart people who want to be part of this growing industry."

For more information on the event, click here.