Representatives from 45 different marketing and sales companies attended the annual Marketing and Sales Talent Night on Monday.

The excitement lasted from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Ellington Ballroom in the Holmes Student Center. According to Rick Ridnour, NIU’s Enterprise Rent-A-Car professor of sales, the companies that attended have found success with NIU students in the past and have heard of the good reputation NIU has.

To fill the tables, Michele Kaczka, program coordinator for the Office of Sales, reached out to companies. Many of the companies have been to the event in the past, and many are represented by alumni looking to recruit more NIU students.

Dustin Ruholl, supervisor at Consolidated Electrical Distributors (CED), is a 2011 graduate of NIU. He made contact with CED at a Marketing and Sales Talent Night when he was a student. Ruholl attended the event as a representative for the company.

“To prepare for this event when I was a student here, I did research of the companies attending the event so I could get knowledge of the company and have something to talk about with the representative right off the bat,” Ruholl said. “The best part about these events is being able to network and meet representatives face-to-face.”

Brad Selby, Lakeshore Division Manager at CED, spoke of the qualities that led to Ruholl’s hire.

“The people who impress us the most are the people who have demonstrated a willingness to work hard,” Selby said. “We look for someone with a sense of direction who have a plan on what they want to do.”

China Grant, partner marketing manager for SurePayroll, seems to be looking for the same type of person to fill the three to five positions that will be opening up within the company.

“We look for someone highly self-motivated who’s actually able to think on their feet and make their own decisions,” Grant said. “It is also a plus if the person wants to be in sales for a long time.”

Since the event focused on jobs in the field of marketing and sales, competition isn’t as great as at events like the internship or job fair, according to Kaczka.

“Since the discipline is more specific, the company knows what type of student is going to come up and talk to them,” said Kaczka. “We help facilitate the student-corporate relationship and give students exposure for what they want to do after graduation.”

Kaczka said this event is ideal for networking, and since it is somewhat like a job fair, it helps students feel comfortable in larger fair settings and practice important skills: communication, sales, creativity and professionalism. Grant said these qualities are important in helping students gain experience in showcasing their own sales skills.

Targeting a specific field, in this case marketing and sales, helps companies narrow down hiring decisions.

“The event is different than job fairs because it targets one particular discipline, while the job fairs are for all majors and have a wide variety of jobs,” said Ridnour. “With this, the company knows that the students they are talking to is fit to what the company is looking for.”

Ridnour said approximately one-third of the companies at the event will be at the job fair.

Senior marketing major Tim Campbell hopes the fair will help him in his career.

“I came to the event last year and would send out emails to companies I was interested in after the event, and I’d hear back from them pretty quickly,” he said. “They were mostly looking for full-time jobs, which I couldn’t take because I was a student, but since I’m graduating soon I’m hoping for similar offers this year.”

Campbell said he already has two job interviews set up. The marketing and sales event is hosted once a year.

For more information, go to www.cob.niu.edu/MarketingTalentNight.