6 min read
A careers fair is an arithmetic problem before it is a marketing one.
Thousands of students and graduates walk through the RDS on 6 October. More than eighty employers are recruiting. The doors are open for six hours. Divide the floor by the stands and you get the number that actually governs everything: each conversation lasts somewhere between thirty seconds and two minutes. Touch, and go.
Most exhibitors plan for the wrong part. They design a banner for someone standing still and reading, when nobody is standing still. They collect business cards into a bowl and discover on Thursday that a bowl is not a pipeline. They answer the same six questions four hundred times and lose the two conversations that mattered, because those two are indistinguishable from the other three hundred and ninety-eight by six o’clock.
We are a small company. Napblog Limited has seven people and one stand. So we have spent the last three weeks preparing against the constraint rather than pretending it away, and we organise that preparation the way we organise everything: Team, Technology, Traction. Here is where each stands, honestly, three weeks out.
T1 · Team
The first thing worth saying is what we are not. We are not a company that can put six people on a stand in matching shirts. On 6 October there will be a founder and, if the hiring round we ran this week lands, one campaign person.
That sounds like a weakness and in one way it is. In another it is the entire proposition. If you talk to Nap OS at the RDS, you are talking to the person who built it and who will still be answering the phone in January. There is no filter between what you ask and who can answer it. For a student deciding whether an unfamiliar Irish company is real, that matters more than a bigger stand would.
We interviewed twelve people this week for one campaign role, across a single day, and the question we asked every one of them was not about marketing. It was: what happens in the three weeks after the fair? Because that is where this is won. The stand is the easy part. The people we shortlisted were the ones who had finished something when nobody was checking.
T2 · Technology
Here is the part we have actually built for 6 October.
On the stand there is a QR code, printed 320mm square, sitting about a metre off the ground at comfortable scanning height. It does not open a landing page or a form. It opens WhatsApp, with a message already typed: Hi from the Nap OS stand.
Behind that number is an AI adviser, running on the WhatsApp Business platform, that answers immediately. Not a chatbot that collects an email and promises someone will be in touch. An adviser that opens the conversation itself, explains what Nap OS does, asks what is actually blocking the person, and tells them which project would help — and which offers to put them through to a human founder at any point, because a fair number of people would rather talk to one.
The reason this matters is capacity. A founder on a stand can hold perhaps two hundred real conversations in six hours. The adviser can hold a thousand at once, at eleven at night, three days later, when the student has actually got around to thinking about it. The QR turns a forty-second interaction into a conversation that continues on the person’s own schedule — and that is the single biggest difference between a fair that produces a bowl of cards and a fair that produces a pipeline.
What took the time was not building it. It was teaching it what not to say.
Over several weeks we ran adversarial testing against it — hostile students, sceptical employers, university procurement officers, people accusing us of running a scam, people threatening to post the conversation publicly. Every failure produced a rule. The adviser is now instructed never to quote a price that has been retired, never to name a member without written consent, never to claim a success rate the company cannot evidence, never to promise anyone a job, and never to answer a legal question — if someone raises minimum wage, employment law, visas or immigration, it states two facts and hands over to a person, because a guessed answer in writing to an international student is the worst thing an automated system can produce.
There is a hard stop on under-18s. If anyone says they are in school, doing the Leaving Cert, or gives an age under eighteen, the adviser stops, collects nothing, quotes no price, and hands to a human with a request that a parent or guardian join the conversation. Nap OS signup is for eighteen and over, and the system now enforces that rather than trusting it.
Underneath sits a knowledge base of eleven documents the adviser quotes from rather than improvises against — what Nap OS is, what it costs, what the projects involve, what we may never claim, how to talk to a university, what a completed project actually looks like end to end. Leads land in HubSpot. Nothing depends on anyone remembering a conversation.
T3 · Traction
We keep a roster. Every person who has come through Nap OS is on it, by name, with their role, how long they were with us, and where they are now. The numbers below are counted off that roster, which means they are checkable person by person. That is the whole point of keeping it.
Forty-nine people have come through Nap OS to date. Twenty-three of them are now employed by an outside employer, across twenty-one companies. Five are self-employed, freelancing, or have founded something. Seventeen did or are doing an internship. Forty of the forty-nine are in Ireland; the rest are spread across eight other countries.
The companies are real and you are welcome to check them: Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, ServiceNow, ESB Networks, Bosch Rexroth, Accenture, Teleperformance, Covalen, Enet, Circle K, CPM Ireland, Dublin Business School and others.
Now the honest part. These are our own records, not an audited study, and we will not present them as anything else. We do not publish a success rate, because the roster counts people who came through, not people who signed up, and those are very different numbers. Anyone in this sector quoting you a job placement percentage — us included — is telling you something they cannot prove. We would rather hand you forty-nine names and let you do the arithmetic yourself.
What 10,000 realistically becomes
We modelled it rather than hoped. If ten thousand people pass through and the stand converts the way stands actually convert, a few thousand scans become a few hundred qualified conversations, which become a few dozen discovery calls, which become perhaps twenty subscriptions. Every stage loses most of the people in it, and that is normal.
The reason we built the adviser is that the modelling made one thing obvious: the binding constraint is not attention, it is triage. Answering the same six questions consumes roughly ninety-six of the hundred and seventy hours this campaign needs. Automate that one layer honestly and the founder’s remaining hours go to the conversations that are actually worth having.
What we are not promising
Nap OS does not get anyone a job. It does not replace CVs, interviews, qualifications or recruiters. The project briefs are practice exercises — simulated work, like a case study, not a client’s job handed to an unpaid person — and nobody’s business gets free labour out of them. What is real is the project manager who reviews the work with you, the assessment, and the record an employer can verify with us by phone or email.
Creating an account is free, and you can read the briefs before you pay anything. Nap OS Workforce is €49.99 a month, rolling, cancellable, for the one-to-one project management and the verified record. That is the entire offer and there is nothing behind it.
Come and test it
Stand at the RDS, Tuesday 6 October, 11:00 to 17:00. Free entry for students, graduates and job seekers.
Scan the code and interrogate the adviser. Try to catch it out — several people already have, and every time they did we fixed something. Ask for Pugazheanthi Palani at the stand if you would rather argue with a person.
Universities teach. Nap OS proves. Employers hire.
Napblog Limited · CRO 812006 · 77 Camden Street Lower, Saint Kevin’s, Dublin D02 XE80 · palani@napblog.com · +353 89 453 0418 · os.napblog.com
