by Jacqueline Gergal
A record-breaking 13,909 co-op students met with employers during the first ten days of main round employer interviews at the Tatham Centre this fall. That’s a 15 percent increase in interviews (including in-person, phone and web-based) over last year. On October 19, more than 1,700 interviews took place, breaking another record for the most interviews in one day.
“This main round, we saw and felt a volume and an energy we’ve never seen before,” said Grace Wong. “Our in-person employers alone paged for 15,167 students over the 19 day period, as compared to 11,573 last term. This term was the first with a fully operational fourth call centre, and we certainly maxed out all the space we had!”
Even with all of these interviews, the response time from when a student is paged to when they are on their way to their interview is under two minutes.
“We have an efficient system here,” said Baltej Parmar, a co-op student helping out with interview day services. “With so many employers and students we are prepared for anything. Even if our system went offline we have all of the interview times, students and employers printed out on sheets of paper.”
The number of employer information sessions increased as well; for winter 2018, 62 organizations are already registered, which is and increase from approximately 50 at the same time last year. Both employers and students enjoy networking at the University of Waterloo, and seeing what opportunities are available.
With continuous interviews around the corner, the team at the Tatham Centre will be preparing for the next round of interviews which started this past Monday.
