Good news for those who might want a job with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA): Although an in-person job fair scheduled for July is officially canceled, the agency will host a virtual event online.
“Given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we will not be hosting an in-person job fair in July [but] will be hosting a virtual job fair Wednesday, June 24, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.,” a spokesperson for the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapon agency said by email on May 29.
Those interested can register for the virtual job fair online.
“Attendance is not limited to any specific number,” the agency spokesperson said. “However, NNSA strongly recommends that candidates register for the event as soon as registration becomes available.”
The NNSA wants the online job fair to resemble past in-person job fairs in the Washington, D.C., area: a central lobby filled with booths staffed by representatives of the various NNSA site contractors. As with the live job fair, attendees can submit their resumes in advance and may be called for one-on-one interviews with hiring managers and human resources. Attendees will be able to watch videos provided by the different “booths” by logging in to an online portal.
The NNSA had planned to conduct job fairs in Washington and Albuquerque, N.M., but those were put on hold indefinitely amid the pandemic, the agency spokesperson said.
In the past several years, NNSA job fairs have created some of the only traces of the agency visible to the multitudes of Washington commuters and tourists. The agency periodically purchased advertising on the Washington Metro subway rail systems, including on railcars and at certain high-traffic stations.
When the NNSA postponed the in-person job fair scheduled for July, it had to pull some of that advertising, federal procurement notes show. Do-it-all publicity company Outfront Media Inc. took a roughly $210,000 hit in the pocketbook after the agency yanked plans to advertise the July job fair in the Metro station beneath the Pentagon in Arlington, Va.
