After organizing a job fair to help a friend, Shmuel Dovid Berkovicz morphed into a marketplace matchmaker

Photos: Avi Gass

It began as a low-profile job fair, yet unexpectedly galvanized a circle of young community members to supercharge a collective initiative for passing along job leads and résumés.

“It’s like speed dating, just with jobs,” says Shmuel Dovid Berkovicz, the man who almost by accident jumpstarted it all, reflecting on four packed job fairs and 200 job placements, proving that you don’t need to be an askan to effect real change

The time: A cold, damp evening in January 2025.

The place: The Westwood One, a retrofitted medical facility-turned-office building whose angled glass walls expose its massive, and now iconic, brightly lit two-story lobby for all passersby.

ONthat night, the Westwood reopened its doors well after most of its tenants had left for the evening to host the first ever Parnassah Job Fair, which, in retrospect, seems like more of an afterthought and a desperate attempt to do something to combat the growing unemployment rate among men in Lakewood. Organizers called the event for 8 p.m. and predicted attendance would hover in the 50-person range, hoping for the best.

Statistically speaking, the job fair should have been a dud. According to the SHRM Talent Acquisition Benchmarking Report (2022–2023), only two percent of employers nationwide say job fairs are a highly effective source of hires, and Recruiting.com, which analyzes hundreds of US job fairs, concluded that fewer than one percent of job fair résumé submissions lead to a long-term hire.

But that evening defied statistics. Within 15 minutes of starting time, over 500 people jammed the Westwood lobby, about a third of them looking for work and the remainder eager to help their fellow Yid find an opportunity. People milled around, looking to make introductions and connect those seeking positions with employers looking to fill open ones. Before the event officially ended, several placements had been procured and dozens of solid leads were generated.

Beyond the actual statistic-defying numbers produced by the event, it catapulted job placement squarely onto the collective communal agenda, and its reverberations were felt far beyond Lakewood, as Passaic, Baltimore, and Monsey all held Parnassah fairs in quick succession.

Almost a year after that memorable evening, I returned to Westwood to meet Shmuel Dovid Berkovicz — the man who dreamed up the event and, almost by accident, became the face of Lakewood’s job scene. It wasn’t a spotlight he ever sought, but he didn’t run from it either; if anything, he’s using it to show that you don’t need a title or an office to make an impact.