Guide

Job fair or university day in Argentina: minimal registration, talks by room and what to measure

By SOMOS DER · October 30, 2026 · 7 min read

A job fair is accredited with a short pre-registration (name, email and degree program are enough), time slots so students do not all arrive at once, one check-in point per talk room and a separate attendee type for companies, speakers and staff. What exhibiting companies want to know afterwards is how many people really came, at what time and which talks they attended, and that can only be counted if it was measured at the door. If student data will reach the companies, say so at registration.

How it differs from a trade show

Our note on trade show accreditation for exhibitors and visitors covers the general scheme: audience types, setup, re-entry. A job fair or a university day shares that base, but three things change:

• The visitor is young, free and comes in large numbers. They register from their phone, type their email in a hurry and arrive in waves that follow class schedules, not the opening time.
• The visitor is what the companies came for. The exhibitor is not selling a product: they want to meet candidates, and afterwards they will ask how many there were.
• The data is more sensitive. Behind a job fair there are CVs, degree programs and job searches. It is better to ask for little and be clear about what happens to it.

If you are a foreign company or agency organizing a recruiting day in Argentina, some context helps. Public universities in Argentina are tuition-free and very large, so a fair announced on a campus can draw far more students than a registration form suggests. And the State runs programs for job seekers aged 18 to 24: the Fomentar Empleo page for young people describes training, career guidance and work training for that age group, with registration and CV upload on the government's Portal Empleo. If your event is run with a university or a municipality, linking that portal from the registration page is a way for CVs to end up where they belong while your registration stays short.

Step 1: registration with minimal data

Argentina's personal data protection law, Law 25,326, requires data collected to be accurate, adequate, relevant and not excessive for the purpose, and people to be told beforehand what it will be used for and who may receive it. At a job fair that translates into two decisions:

• Name and email are enough to get in. Add degree program and year if you will use them to measure. A national ID number (DNI), an address or a CV are not needed for accreditation.
• If the data will go to the companies, say so in the form. "Your data will be shared with the exhibiting companies" is a sentence that has to appear before the submit button, not in a separate set of rules.

In PASE the student registers on the event page and receives their QR code by email, with the badge in PDF. The email checker warns them if they typed gmial.com or hotmail.con, which with an audience registering from their phones prevents many passes that would never arrive, and the "Recover my pass" page solves the case of whoever lost it. If exchange students are coming, the registration page and the email are also available in English. More on choosing fields in what to ask in event registration.

Step 2: one type per audience, each with its own link

Students, company representatives, speakers, staff and press should not register through the same form. In PASE each attendee type has its own link and the person stays in the type of the link, so a student cannot sign up as an exhibitor to skip the queue. The companies' link goes by email to the person in charge of each booth; the students' link goes to the general promotion.

A useful trick for the report: if the companies care about degree programs, you can create one type per program or per school, each with its own link. The report by type then gives you the real attendance of each one without cross-checking spreadsheets.

Step 3: time slots to spread arrivals

The crowd management guidance from the UK's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recommends, for large audiences, staggering arrivals and departures, and planning what happens if more people arrive than the venue can safely hold. At a job fair the peak is predictable: the hour when classes end.

PASE has time slots with a capacity per slot: the student chooses a day and time when registering, sees how many places are left or that the slot is full, and a full slot stops accepting people on its own. The chosen time travels with the pass, the email and the PDF. If you also load a total capacity for the event, PASE emails you a warning at 80 % and 100 % of that capacity.

Step 4: the talks, room by room

Company talks are usually the most valued part and the worst measured. To count them, each room needs its own check-in point, set up to allow re-entry: the student enters one talk, goes back to the hall, enters another. Each pass through is recorded with the check-in point and the time, and the live report shows entries by type, by check-in point and by hour.

• Restricted talks: if a talk is for a limited audience (for example, a workshop only for students of one program), you authorize only that attendee type at that room. Anyone else gets a NOT AUTHORIZED screen.
• Room capacity: each room's capacity is set by the venue's permit. The live report shows how many are coming in, but closing the door when the room is full is decided by the person in charge of the room. Our note on venue capacity limits explains how that works in Argentina.
• Staff and internet: each check-in point needs an operator and an internet connection. If the connection drops, the scanner shows it is offline and lets the operator retry. For how many people you need, see how many check-in points and staff.

Step 5: what to measure for the companies

A company that paid for a booth will ask three things. Prepare the answers from day one:

1. How many really came, not how many registered. They are different numbers, and the gap is the first thing people notice.
2. At what time, to know when to have more people at the booth next time.
3. How many entered their talk, if they gave one.

The PASE report gives real attendance by type, by check-in point and by hour, and the closing report is there to send to each exhibitor (reports are in Spanish). What PASE does not do is record who stopped by each booth: that is not access control. If a company wants contacts, it should use its own form and tell the student what it is for. The law also forbids using data for purposes other than those for which it was collected, so the fair's database is not reused for something else without having said so. For the rest of the analysis, see real event attendance, not registrations.

Ask for little, spread arrivals across time slots, count every room and tell each company how many students it really saw.

Frequently asked questions