Job seekers crowd into employment fair for marijuana industry

Job seekers crowd into employment fair for marijuana industry

Raychel Young woke up early Saturday morning, placed her photography portfolio full of high-resolution prints of marijuana flowers into a large yellow envelope and headed to San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom.

Thirty-two companies, ranging from industry-focused magazines to dispensaries to cannabis-based data and technology startups, attended the Join the GreenRush event, searching for candidates to fill jobs as budtenders, cultivators, delivery drivers, marketers and even software developers, in order to meet their expanding needs for workers as the market for legal marijuana continues to grow across California and several other states.

The event was the inaugural job fair for GreenRush, a technology and marketing company that connects already legal medical marijuana users with cannabis delivery systems, a sort of Eat24 of the marijuana industry.

“With cannabis as the nation’s fastest-growing industry, there are a large number of positions opening up that we need to fill,” said Jude Ignatius, event coordinator and director of operations at GreenRush.

Young, 19, from Foster City, showed off her portfolio in hopes of snagging one of those positions, specifically as a photographer for a cannabis sales company.

David Drake, CEO of Cannabis Reports, a cannabis data and technology company based in Berkeley, said he has seen no shortage of candidates for cannabis-focused tech jobs, an area of work in the industry people also might not typically think of.

Outside of the event, a line to enter the door went down Van Ness Avenue and wrapped around part of the block through mid-afternoon, with small crowds gathering inside around three rows of tables and a stage where informational sessions were held.

Many attendees showed up to the job fair specifically to make connections and get into the industry before an initiative that would legalize recreational use of cannabis in California is expected to appear on the November ballet, where it is likely to pass.

The husband and wife showed particular interest in the edible cannabis industry, which they see becoming increasingly more popular among the aging Baby Boomer generation, especially as legalization picks up.

Ignatius said officials in the medical marijuana industry have already started to beef up infrastructure and employee numbers for what could ultimately become an over $10-billion-dollar industry, depending upon legalization outcomes.