Chris Heivly Emcees Big Top
On Thursday, Feb. 7th, Chris Heivly (co-founder MapQuest & founder, Startup Factory) partnered with Techli to bring his new job fair concept, ‘Tech Jobs Under The Big Top‘ to St. Louis.
We first told you about the event HERE and if the crowd was any indication, the event was a success. ‘Tech Jobs’ had room for 250 people and 250 registered with over 90 people on the wait list. 
Different than other job fairs, ‘Tech Jobs Under the Big Top’ had a circus theme complete with a walker on stilts, popcorn, hotdogs, nachos and a clown. Companies gave a three minute pitch on stage to the assembled audience of job seekers and afterwards everyone was free to mingle with the various companies to chat about their open positions.
Prior to coming to St. Louis, Heivly had only done ‘Big Top’ in North Carolina and was looking for a new market to branch out into. “Coming to St. Louis and partnering with Techli was a great way to prove this type of job fair works,” said Heivly. “Too many job fairs are stilted affairs with too many suits and not enough interaction between the hiring companies and the job seekers. The way we do it, companies need to pitch the job seekers on working with them.”
Braving near arctic weather, the line at the door grew fast before all the job seekers were admitted. Anton Xavier, (CEO of Food Essentials) commented, “We like events like these as we like to support the community and never know where we are going to meet our next great employee. We had some excellent conversations with job seekers tonight and are happy we participated.”
