Job Fair Attracts Thousands, Brings Downtown Traffic To A Crawl

More than 9,000 people turned out for the 8th Annual Workforce Solutions Upper Rio Grande Job Expo at the convention center in downtown El Paso on Wednesday.

“It’s been very tough,” said Margarita Lucio. The single mom of two passed out resume’s around the convention floor touting her career achievements, including her Master’s degree. “They say I’m overqualified. I really need to take care of my payments and my house and my children, and I don’t have money. I don’t know what to do.”

The job fair, which was the biggest in the borderland this year with more than 300 employers offering more than 5,600 jobs, drew mixed reactions from job-seekers.

“There was a lot of empty booths. I wish it was a little more filled up, so it was so-so,” said one young woman. Others complained that some employers were not taking resume’s, but were instead asking people to fill out applications online.

For one 63-year-old man seeking a fresh start after months of unemployment, the job fair was somewhat discouraging. “I think not being bilingual is a factor. You look at me and you look at the crowd here… they don’t want to hire me. My brother said that I should cut off my beard and shave my head so they couldn’t quite think I was so old.”

Still, employers who talked to ABC-7 said they were impressed with the number of qualified applicants that passed through their booths. “I honestly thought I’d see more downtrodden individuals. They are very eager, they are here to impress,” said Brooke Underwood.

Mayor John Cook stopped by the job fair in the early afternoon. The city has an unemployment rate of 9.6 percent, which is slightly higher than the national rate of 9.7 percent. “I’m extremely optimistic that we’re going to continue to bring employers to the city,” he said. “If we can fill almost 6 thousand jobs today, then we’ve been successful in what our mission was.”

Organizers encouraged job seekers to take public transportation to the event so as to avoid heavy traffic and parking issues downtown. At the busiest points in the job fair, traffic slowed to a crawl near the convention center.