THIS year’s Daily Echo Job Fair has been hailed one of the best yet, with hundreds of job-seekers taking the chance to find out about the range of jobs on offer.

There were queues at the opening of the event, at the Premier Inn on Bournemouth’s Westover Road, and nearly 400 people arrived in the first hour.

There were 35 employers available to meet job-hunters.

The event was sponsored by LV=, which employs nearly 2,000 people at its County Gates HQ.

Rachel Gulwell, resourcing consultant with LV=, said: “We’re looking for a really mixed range. For us, it’s all about looking for great talent.

“We have a lot of contact centre customer service positions. But as it’s our head office we’re looking for a lot of support functions as well.

“We do a lot of talent pooling, so it’s not just about vacancies we’re looking to fill now but vacancies we’re looking to fill in a few weeks or months’ time.”

Dan Roberts, telephony and customer contact manager with the Eden car dealership group, had jobs for a wide range of people, but was especially keen to hire customer service people for its Branksome site.

“We’ve created a state of the art customer contact and engagement centre which is what we’re here predominantly for,” he said.

He said customer service staff now needed to use “every communication channel you can imagine”.

Robin Fielder, general manager at Eden Branksome, said customer service now involved live chat and email as well as the phone, with many customers shopping and enquiring via the web.

“A lot of the interaction is done online,” he said.

Angela Boyer, key account manager with the Daily Echo, said of the fair: “At this stage, it’s one of the best events we’ve had so far, possibly due to the range of businesses that we have – everyone from a car dealer to a Greek restaurant.

“We’re really pleased with the quality and the quantity of exhibitors.”

The event was run in partnership with sw1jobs.com, Newsquest’s platform for recruitment in the south west.

Job-hunters can register at the site to receive email alerts about potential vacancies.

Dawn Sweeney, MD of Newsquest Recruitment Solutions: “Job fairs like this show the opportunities there are for jobs in our local communities and how SW1 jobs and the Bournemouth Echo partnership is able to unlock those opportunities for jobseekers.”