Higher education has long been associated with the promise of secure employment and upward social mobility. While participation in higher education has expanded, the number of stable, high-status graduate positions has not grown at a comparable rate, intensifying competition among graduates and employers for highly skilled candidates (Isopahkala-Bouret & Tholen, 2023). Consequently, transitions from higher education to the labour market have become increasingly uncertain across Europe, with rising levels of under-employment and persistent mismatches between educational attainment and occupational demands (Albert et al., 2023; Figueiredo et al., 2015; Tomlinson, 2012). These structural tensions strain the traditional promise of higher education, widening the gap between expectations of secure graduate employment and contemporary labour market realities.

In this presentation, we examine graduate recruitment fairs targeted at higher education students. These fairs provide students with opportunities to meet potential employers and explore career paths, while also functioning as institutionalised spaces where public higher education intersects with private, commercial actors (see Davis & Binder, 2016). Using assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), we conceptualise graduate recruitment fairs as socio-material assemblages, in which employability emerges relationally through interactions among higher education institutions, private companies, recruitment firms, students, and non-human actors such as recruitment platforms, branding materials, and spatial arrangements within market-oriented discourses. Employability is thus not an individual attribute, but a situated accomplishment co-produced and evaluated across heterogeneous actors.

Higher education institutions play a key role in these processes by organising fairs, selecting employer partners, and developing recruitment infrastructures and services. These practices introduce market-like logics into public higher education, shaping perceptions of which education is valuable and who gains access to selective recruitment pathways (Brown & Carasso, 2013; Slaughter & Taylor, 2016; Davis & Binder, 2016). While commercial and sponsorship elements are not new, recent developments emphasise the growing influence of market-oriented governance and the expansion of recruitment-related services, normalising competitive selection, self-marketing, and activities aimed at enhancing employability. These dynamics can also create exclusive networks that advantage certain partners and students, raising critical questions about equity and the role of public higher education in supporting academic values, equal opportunity, and the public good (Rivera, 2015; Tzoc & Gondal, 2023; Hogan & Thompson, 2021; Bok, 2003).

Drawing on ethnographic data from Finnish graduate recruitment fairs, this presentation addresses the question: What kind of employability assemblages emerge at graduate recruitment fairs? We examine how heterogeneous actors and material arrangements are brought into relation to produce particular configurations of knowledge, expectations, and practices around graduate employability. Finland provides a particularly instructive context, combining the highest unemployment rate in the EU with a long-standing tradition of public higher education and broadly accessible educational opportunities. By situating graduate recruitment fairs in Finland and across broader European contexts, this study contributes to international debates on graduate transitions, employability, and the evolving relationship between public higher education, labour markets, and market-oriented logics.

Methodologically, this study draws on multi-sited ethnography, adapted to examine graduate recruitment events as socio-material assemblages. Often referred to as “event ethnography,” this approach involves short, intensive periods of fieldwork in temporally and spatially bounded settings (e.g., Baird, 2017; Player-Koro et al., 2022; van Zanten & Legavre, 2014). The dataset comprises ethnographic material collected at five graduate recruitment fairs held in different Finnish cities between January 2025 and January 2026. Four of these fairs were organised on university campuses and targeted primarily at students of the host institutions, while one was a large-scale, nationwide event organised by an external commercial actor. Fieldwork consisted of approximately 50 hours of ethnographic observations, fieldnotes, and photography, enabling close examination of interactions, material arrangements, spatial organisation, and the overall event atmosphere. This methodological approach enables us to address the research question of what kinds of employability assemblages emerge at graduate recruitment fairs. The analysis is informed by assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and thinking-with-theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2022), focusing on how recruitment fairs are constituted through relations between heterogeneous human and non-human elements, including students, employers, higher education representatives, recruitment technologies, promotional materials, and spatial arrangements. Attention is directed to recurring practices and material configurations through which employability is enacted, and through which particular forms of employability are made visible and valued, while others are marginalised. By examining how these assemblages are stabilised, reworked, or contested in practice, the study connects the situated dynamics of graduate recruitment events to broader European and transnational labour market logics.

Our preliminary observations highlight tensions in graduate recruitment fairs. While these events are promoted as opportunities to secure internships, build networks, and gain career advantages, positioning students as the “talent of the future” and reinforcing the promise of higher education, they also reveal a more complex reality. Competition for graduate positions is intense, and many opportunities do not lead to immediate employment or direct access to decision-makers. Rather than functioning solely as sites of matching, graduate recruitment fairs operate as socio-material assemblages, in which particular understandings of graduate employability are produced, circulated, and normalised. Employers and universities communicate imaginaries of the “employable graduate” through presentations, interactions, promotional materials, and spatial arrangements, framing employability in terms of proactivity, flexibility, self-presentation, and cultural fit, foregrounding individualised and market-oriented expectations.. At the same time, these framings coexist uneasily with the egalitarian ideals of publicly funded higher education, producing a tension between universal opportunity and selective access. Preliminary findings suggest that graduate recruitment fairs both sustain the promise of employability embedded in higher education and simultaneously produce unequal conditions of participation, privileging certain forms of interaction and engagement. From an assemblage perspective, these events are key sites where graduate employability is differentially produced, shaping opportunities for navigating competitive labour markets. At the same time, students’ ability to participate in and benefit from these events varies depending on their familiarity with recruitment practices, their social networks, and the ways the events are organized and structured.

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