A Career Fair Where Students Had to Visit Every Stand

The complaint employers make about university career fairs is always the same. They pay for a stand, they send two people for three days, and they talk to the same self-selecting students who would have found them anyway. The rest of the room walks past.

Future Maker 2026 at NOVA IMS ran from 17 to 19 March with employer stands, talks and workshops across the campus. We turned 115 locations into checkpoints, including the employer stands, and let students collect them.

The numbers

• 265 unique players across three days
• 2,591 treasures found from 115 checkpoints
• 1,024,700 FM tokens minted, 3,867 per student on average
• 424 merch purchases, burning 813,300 FM back out of circulation
• 7,495 on-chain transactions in total
• Peak hour 1 PM, with 1,619 transactions

Employer stands got measured traffic

The interesting part of the checkpoint table is the employer section. Philip Morris recorded 40 finds, Accenture 37, DareData 36, CTT 35, and JTA 33. Those are not impressions or estimates. Each one is a student who physically walked to that stand and tapped their phone on it.

For a recruiting team, that number answers the question the fair never usually answers. You stop arguing about whether the stand was in a good position and start looking at a count, next to the counts everyone else got.

The spread between the top employer stand and the fifth is narrow, 40 down to 33. Whatever the usual advantage of a stand near the door is worth, it did not show up as a gap here.

Day two is the real day

Activity ran 1,936 transactions on day one, 3,736 on day two, and 1,823 on day three. Day two nearly doubled day one.

That pattern has shown up in every multi-day deployment we have run, and it comes from word of mouth. Students who played on day one bring the people they had lunch with on day two. It also means the day one numbers are not the deployment's numbers, which is worth saying out loud to any employer who checks the dashboard on the first afternoon and worries.

The daily peak sat at 1 PM, around the lunch break, when the hall fills with students who have nowhere particular to be.

Most of the checkpoints were not ours

This is the number that surprised us. Of the 116 tags on the final checkpoint table, 70 were hidden by players rather than placed by us, by 68 different people. Those player-hidden tags accounted for 1,116 finds, about 43% of the total.

They were also competitive with the official ones. "Banana" pulled 31 finds, "Hidden_Behind" 30 and "Secret Point" 28, which puts all three ahead of most employer stands.

A player-hidden tag is content the organizer did not have to produce, placed where students actually go, and named in a way that makes other students want to find it. By day two it was doing a meaningful share of the work of keeping the game alive.

The reward store did the recruiting the flyers do not

424 items were claimed from a 21-item store. The plain notebook was the runaway winner at 84 units, ahead of mousepads at 50 and the laptop case at 40. The expensive sweatshirts barely moved, in single digits each.

The lesson for anyone stocking one of these: cheap, useful and carryable beats impressive. Students earned their tokens by walking the fair, and they spent them on things they would use the following week.

Why this works better on a campus than it looks

115 checkpoints is a lot, and it worked because a campus has the density for it. Buildings are close, students already move between them between sessions, and the ratio of 0.43 checkpoints per player landed in the same band as every other event we have measured.

The full report, with the per-checkpoint table, the leaderboard and the hourly curve, is public: see the Future Maker 2026 report. For the format applied to campuses generally, see scavenger hunts for universities, and for the employer side, trade show booth traffic.