When you hear the term “career fair,” the image that comes to mind is probably a tightly packed event space with rows of tables, long lines of candidates waiting to talk to recruiters and ever-growing piles of employer brochures and candidate resumes. Career fairs are traditionally held by universities, government organizations or even individual companies in order to recruit new talent. But expensive, chaotic, in-person job fairs are not the only — or most effective — way to attract and engage with candidates. Many organizations turned to virtual events and virtual career fair solutions to meet their hiring needs over the past few years. Virtual career fair solutions have evolved to meet the pressing needs of today’s talent acquisition leaders and should be a component of a company’s overall hiring strategy. This step-by-step guide will share best practices for companies, universities and organizations planning to host a virtual career fair.
What Are Virtual Career Fairs?
A virtual career fair is a type of hiring event that connects employers and job candidates through an online platform. Virtual career fairs have many of the same advantages as in-person career fairs, such as the ability to host booths for multiple companies or recruiters in one centralized place. Even though virtual career fairs take place in an online environment, that doesn’t mean they need to be impersonal. In fact, one of the most common goals of a virtual career fair is to facilitate one-on-one conversations between recruiters and candidates.
The key difference between in-person and virtual career fairs is that instead of walking around booths and talking face-to-face, recruiters and candidates in virtual career fairs rely on alternate forms of communication such as text chats, video or audio calls. And because of this difference, recruiters can engage with more candidates in less time, compared with a traditional in-person hiring event.
The differences don’t stop there. In addition to alternate forms of communication, virtual career fairs offer major advantages over in-person career fairs, like the ability to provide candidates who are waiting to talk to recruiters a plethora of options to continue to engage with the employer, more efficient and effective follow-up tools, and a more robust selection of candidate data that is easy for the employer and/or event host to access.
What Are the Benefits of Virtual Career Fairs?
Compared to in-person events, virtual career fairs offer a series of distinct benefits. With virtual career fairs, employers are no longer limited by location when seeking new candidates, which helps to attract more candidates and diversify the talent pool. Likewise, candidates are able to attend career fairs from anywhere, so companies that were once out-of-reach due to distance might now be on their target list.
Virtual career fairs can also be much less expensive than in-person fairs. By hosting virtual hiring events, employers and other organizational hosts will no longer need to rent a large event space and pay for recruiters to travel to the event. For universities, membership organizations and government organizations that host career fairs, the reduced cost of participation can attract more employers and job seekers to attend the event.
Furthermore, employers at virtual career fairs can benefit from the ability to screen candidates in advance. At an in-person event, recruiters may see long lines of candidates waiting to speak with them without knowing which candidates would be the best fit for available opportunities. Some virtual career fair solutions enable employers to set up registration forms for candidates to fill out prior to entering the company event or booth so that the best-match candidates are placed at the top of the queue, making the overall hiring process more efficient.
In addition, virtual career fairs enable employers to upload talent acquisition materials such as videos, brochures, active job postings, employee testimonials, social media profiles and links to the company website or Glassdoor reviews. These features broaden the type of collateral that employers can share, while reducing the need to bring physical materials back and forth from the office to the job fair location. Candidates are also able to submit their contact information or fill out registration forms online prior to the virtual event. Often, this data will automatically integrate with the company’s ATS or CRM so recruiters can do targeted follow-up communication after the event. This gives TA teams an effective way to connect with candidates who registered but did not attend the event, expanding their talent pools even more.
If your organization is planning to host a virtual career fair, follow these seven steps to make your event a success.
How to Host a Virtual Career Fair
Step 1: Determine Your Goals
Career fairs can be used for purposes ranging from career discovery and networking to hiring for open positions, internship programs or a class of entry-level employees. The first step in hosting a virtual career fair is to determine your specific goals. For example, a university hosting an event with many companies may want to drive awareness about available internships and entry-level opportunities across a wide range of industries. By contrast, an individual company or a government organization hosting a virtual career fair may want to hire dozens of new employees that day. Further still, any organization may strive to diversify the talent pipeline and host a career event specifically to reach historically underrepresented job candidates.
Having target attendance numbers in mind is also a good idea at this initial stage. A university hosting a virtual career fair may have a goal of including 150+ companies across different industries and encouraging thousands of students to attend. On the other hand, the campus recruiting team at an individual company hosting a virtual career fair to promote internship and entry-level programs might strive for just 100 attendees who are specific to the roles that company is hiring for. Documenting your goals early will help you measure the event’s success later.
Step 2: Consider the Features You Will Need for Your Event
Based on your goals, think about the technical features that will make your virtual event a success. Do your recruiters need pre-screening questions to narrow down the pool of candidates? If you are looking to hire the same day, do you need video and audio capabilities to conduct on-the-spot interviews? If you are a university or membership organization hosting a large event with many employer booths, do you need a dedicated resource center that offers a “virtual map,” event guide, and other information to ensure things run smoothly?
Universities and organizations hosting a large-scale event with many company participants may also wish to choose a virtual career fair solution that offers configurable booths for companies to choose which features they want. Make a list of your must-haves and nice-to-haves, then start the vendor research process.
Step 3: Select A Solution
After you figure out your goals and desired features, explore virtual career solutions that suit these needs. In addition to the features the solution offers, some other criteria to evaluate virtual career solutions include how many years of experience it has, the cost and any training options.
Another best practice during the research and evaluation phase is to ask your preferred virtual event partner for case studies to understand how their solution has worked with customers in the past. You will want to look for solutions that have experience in helping customers of a similar size and in the same industry as your organization.
Last but not least, you will want to make sure the solution is easy to use. Most virtual career fair solutions will allow you to request a demo so you can get a feel for how it works. You should also make sure your solution offers live support in case of any technical issues on the day of the event.
Step 4: Set Up the Logistics for Your Event
Once you’ve determined your solution, set the date and time for the event. Then start planning the nitty-gritty details. To start, confirm the number of companies that will participate (if it’s a large-scale event like a university career fair) and the number of recruiters who will be present (this applies to virtual career fairs of any scope). Now is also the time to decide if you want the event to have live broadcasts, webinars or an intro session.
For a larger-scale event such as a virtual career fair hosted by a university or government organization, create an event lobby that is easy to navigate, so prospective candidates can connect with the employers they are most interested in. Figure out which companies will have booths and who will represent them. Virtual career fairs that are hosted by only one company may have booths and recruiters for individual locations, departments or job functions.
Make sure all exhibitors and attendees have their login links before the event begins. Prior to the event, every booth representative should also have access to training.
Finally, determine if you want to record any sessions or keep the booths active for a period of time after the event so attendees can peruse the company’s resources.
Step 5: Promote Your Event to Prospective Candidates
Even if you’ve set everything up perfectly, your virtual career event will be meaningless without attendees. So how will you get people to attend?
There are plenty of marketing channels to attract job seekers. If you are a company, university or any other type of government or membership organization, you can post about the event on your social media pages, share it on your website and send out email blasts to candidates or students who are already in your pipeline. We highly recommend driving traffic from your job ads to virtual career fairs, rather than directing candidates to an application form. Recruiters may also source candidates on LinkedIn based on specific targeting criteria, such as industry, experience level, university and job function.
Depending on your industry and the roles you are hiring for, you may also consider launching an advertising campaign, such as ads posted on job boards, newsletters for relevant trade organizations or targeted social media ads. Since you won’t need to allocate budget for travel expenses, you may wish to increase your marketing resources to reach prospective candidates.
Once you start getting sign-ups to the event, send out email reminders a few days beforehand to ensure high attendance. Your email reminders should include event details such as date and time, the access link, the agenda (if any) and other valuable information that candidates should know in advance.
Step 6: Launch the Event
When the big day arrives, get excited! To ensure a positive user experience, have a few dedicated staff members on standby to assist with any logistical questions from recruiters and candidates. Some event hosts even create a “help” booth to make it easy for people to get quick answers from your support staff.
Companies participating in a virtual career fair should ensure the booth is well-staffed (we recommend one recruiter for every 10 candidates signed up for the event) and the talent acquisition materials are ready to go. For companies that have multiple recruiters participating in an event (either their own or as part of a larger event), it helps to create a cheat sheet of standardized responses to frequently asked questions regarding the job application process. This is especially helpful for a text chat feature, where the recruiters can copy-and-paste a process-driven answer and spend more time building connections with candidates.
Step 7: Follow-Up After the Event
When the event ends, that doesn’t mean the hiring process is over! Now is the time to analyze your event using your solution’s analytics and reporting tools. Large-scale events like university career fairs may analyze data to understand which employers received the most traffic, while company-run events can examine metrics like the number of chats that occurred, and the number of candidates categorized as qualified/follow up.
You’ll also want to take advantage of some of the automated tools that some of the virtual career fair solutions offer in order to make your follow-up process seamless and quick. Since candidates are likely assessing multiple potential employers, those that can create an amazing candidate experience are poised to win the favor of top talent. Timely follow-up goes a long way. Send emails and schedule next steps either during or immediately after the event by leveraging these tools to set yourself up for success.
To receive more qualitative feedback, you can also send out a survey afterward to ask attendees about their experience, as well as how they heard about the event. If there are any pre-recorded videos or resources that will be available even after the event ends, make sure to communicate that to attendees.
Best of all, participating companies will have a new candidate pool to tap into for future job openings. Send a thank you message to candidates, as well as calls-to-action based on the candidates’ status in the hiring pipeline (initial interest, application, interview, etc.). Create a plan for continued communication, such as invitations to future hiring events and notifications about new job openings that align with their skills.
Get Started with Radancy
To recap, virtual career fairs are an increasingly important part of talent acquisition. The speed, flexibility, seamless integration with applicant tracking systems and relatively low cost make virtual career fairs an attractive option for recruiters, candidates and event hosts like universities and government organizations. If you are looking to get started with virtual career fairs of your own, request a demo of the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud to learn more.
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