Do the job fairs useful?

Last week in my company our HR called a meeting with some people. This meeting was regarding my company wanted to participate in some Job Fair and they wanted to discuss the strategy they wanted to follow to get the good candidates through Job fair. They want us (Technical Panel) to help them out with this.

From the Employer point of view:

I was wondering what could be the reason they wanted to participate in the job fair instead of filling the positions from either referral or through consultants.

The reason was simple; they wanted to cut down the cost of recruitment by participating in job fair. It was a success from the company point of view as they got around 300 resumes of the expected expertise with the relevant experience people they are looking for. If they get these resumes from consultant that would cost them much more money than participation in the job fair.

From the Employee point of view:

Here we do have two different groups in the employees.

First one Fresh out of college who don’t have any experience in the software industry.

Second category would be those who have some years of experience. For fresh graduates I saw that most of the companies would not take in through job fair, because we already discussed above about their targeted professionals. I could see very less number of experienced professionals turned up for a job fair with the specific skill set the companies looking for.

So, I was unable to figure out are these job fairs useful at all?

Who organize these job fairs?

Usually these are organized by the big consultant firms and job portals like Naukri, Times jobs etc.

Are these consultants making money and publicity out of these job fairs they organize?

It seems like all these are open Questions.

All your comments would be appreciated.