Just like most jobs have shifted to a remote setting (virtual format) due to the pandemic, recruitment solutions have followed suit too. Amid the pandemic, virtual interviews have become the norm, and so have virtual career fairs.
Benefits of Virtual Career Fairs
- They have no limitations in terms of geography. People from around the globe can attend the fair from the comfort of their homes.
- The recruiters get access to a more comprehensive talent pool that is much larger than the talent pool at a local career fair. The global talent pool is more significant in size, more diverse, and skilled.
- The attendees in a virtual career fair are in a controlled environment. All their actions, options, choices, and decisions can be measured and evaluated as a part of the event analytics.
- The metrics, reports, and data provided through the virtual career fair can be crucial for future events. It helps analyze which event features were most popular among the attendees and which didn’t meet the mark.
Questions you must answer before organizing a virtual career fair
- Have you selected the best tentative dates for your virtual career fair? Does it span over a few days or just a single day? Do the tentative dates allow your team to prepare for at least a couple of months?
- What list of goals do you wish to accomplish by organizing a virtual career fair?
- What is the scope of your career fair? Is it national, continent-specific, or global?
- Is your career fair oriented towards a specific industry or a set of industries? If yes, which are they?
- What are the positions that you’re recruiting for? Is it mid-level, senior-level, entry-level, or a mix of all?
Here are eight quick tips that can aid you in organizing the best virtual career fair for your attendees.
1. Choose a flexible virtual event platform
To host an engaging and successful virtual career fair, you need to choose a ‘beyond-webinar’ experience for the attendees. Choose a virtual event platform that is holistic, robust, and offers flexible features. FLOOR provides a top-quality experience for the attendees.
Ensure that the software has features like a one-to-one chat facility, video conferencing options, and a meeting scheduling ability. These features will help companies move ahead with their shortlisted candidates and make closures.
2. Pre-Event preparation
Since you will be organizing and hosting a virtual career fair, it is essential to help your attendees prepare for the same. Whether it is the target companies or the candidates, you must help them prepare for the career fair.
Organizing interactive workshops via LIVE sessions to give them an idea of what they can expect would be a good idea. You can also help them by conducting mock interviews, offering tips to build their resumes, discussing the dress code, practicing interview etiquette and public speaking, in addition to other pre-event support activities to make them feel confident.
3. Plan the content for the virtual career fair
One of the essential steps when organizing an event is to plan the event content. Choose the speakers and speaker’s topics beforehand. Create the videos, images, and text that you will be using through the event. Ensure you have the necessary backups and pre-recorded content to run in case of an emergency. Plan and design the agenda of the virtual career fair. For example, if the fair lasts for three days, you need to plan the schedule for each day, starting from the welcome address and ending with the vote of thanks.
4. Market the virtual career fair
This is another crucial aspect of organizing your virtual career fair. Reach out to the event sponsors, partners, and speakers to give them a brief idea about the career fair in advance. Ensure that all the participants are on the same page before the event starts. Try to arrange a dry-run beforehand if possible. This way, the companies can test out the features of their respective booths and stock them up for D-Day.
Use the benefits of email marketing, advertising, press releases, and social media to market your virtual career fair in advance. You can also market on educational forums and career pages, where people actively seek jobs. Bring diversity in the usage of marketing vehicles for your promotion. This will ensure you cover maximum ground before your event.
5. Set Up Virtual Booths for Companies
You can set up virtual booths to enable the participating companies to use their company name, banner, logo, and description. This will lend a unique brand identity to each booth and highlight its offerings, making it easy for candidates to select which company booths to go to. However, to implement this idea, customizable booths are required. With FLOOR, you can offer customizable booths to the companies attending your career fair.
A representative from the company staff should be available for interaction with the attendees. Each booth should have resources that the attendees can download for their reference.
Here are some features that should be available on each booth
- Downloadable Files: (Candidate Forms, Company Brochure, Map of Office Locations, List of open positions, Current Company News and PR, Corporate Videos, Benefits, and Offerings)
- Link to company’s website
- Welcome Area and Chat Boxes.
6. Provide networking opportunities
With the help of smart registration forms, you can help companies collect the data of talented candidates. Use these forms on landing pages for maximum effect. Let candidates fill out their qualifications, interests, hobbies, skill set, etc. Companies can shortlist the relevant candidates easily using this information.
Candidates, too, should save company information and follow up with the relevant manager post-event. This way, your virtual career fair will provide equal opportunity for both – the companies and the candidates. You can also provide an option to embed the social media handles like the LinkedIn profiles. This feature will help build more trustworthiness both ways.
7. Don’t forget to Follow up
Don’t undermine the importance of following up with the candidates that companies interacted with. Use their contact information and follow up with them via phone calls or emails. Answer any questions that they may have. Potential employees should be kept in touch with to build a solid candidate pipeline for companies.
8. Post-Event Reports and Analytics
It is crucial to study the detailed analytics of the entire virtual career fair. Metrics like poll responses, number of comments, average engagement time, average views per session, number of messages exchanged, etc., can be beneficial. Jobseeker demographics, attendance metrics, and conversion rates are useful evaluation tools. These analytics play a crucial role when planning a new virtual career fair in the future. Especially if the data is presented in graphs, it can help demonstrate the event ROI to company executives and assess what content worked best among the audience.
While face-to-face meetings are an essential aspect of recruitment, with the help of technology, relevant talent can still be identified and shortlisted for further discussions. With the help of robust virtual career fair software like FLOOR, you can easily create branded booths, host webinars, and create a resource center for your company.
0 Comments