Frustrated with your hiring efforts? No longer sure how to recruit top talent? Struggling with hard-to-fill positions? It’s time to modernize your talent acquisition strategy with virtual career fairs.
You’re a top recruiter who knows how to do your job well. But even recruiters who have spent years placing candidates realize that some of the methods they’ve always leaned on are becoming less effective. Candidates might ignore LinkedIn messages because they’re inundated with InMail and much of it is spam. Social media is increasingly noisy, making it more difficult than ever to develop a meaningful connection. And, as always, many of the very best candidates aren’t actively looking for a job, so you have to find them, rather than the other way around.
But you’re in luck. We’ve got a solution, and it’s one that an increasing number of recruiters rely on to bring top talent into their organizations. It’s an idea that’s been around for a while but is now truly optimized for recruiters: virtual career fairs.
What’s a virtual career fair and how does it work?
Virtual career fairs have been around for a while, but if your company hasn’t hosted one, you may not know what you’re missing. Hiring events aren’t just a way to talk to candidates online. They are much more than that. We’re not talking about webinars either, which tend to be one-way broadcasts. Instead, and what we see work for recruiters in various industries every day, is a virtual career fair that does include capabilities for live and recorded video broadcast (like a webinar) but also allows for one-on-one conversations, group interviews and discussions or real-time, text- or video-based chats.
Our Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud offers a Hiring Events solution that is more strategic, helping recruiters meet and vet job candidates quickly, all from the comfort of their home or office using the virtual career fair concept.
Not convinced? Here’s how leveraging virtual career fairs will save you time and money and improve your candidate experience and hiring outcomes.
Attract Better Talent
This is the big goal for every recruiter: to find that gem of a candidate that will make your employer happy they hired you. Or maybe you need to find 100 of those candidates. Using traditional talent acquisition methods could help you reach that goal, but it would take a long time and a lot of hours on the phone.
So how do virtual career fairs increase the quality of your candidate pool? Because it’s easy – even fun – for candidates to participate. Passive candidates in particular won’t go out of their way to attend a job fair. But it’s not so hard to convince those same quality job seekers to attend a virtual career fair to learn about an opportunity, which means you’re able to bring in high-potential people who otherwise might have passed.
Even passive candidates are curious about what other opportunities might be out there for them. They might not agree to a full-day, in-person career fair, but you can probably convince them to take just 10 or 20 minutes out of their day to talk with you and others who work at the company that wants to hire them – they won’t even have to take an hour off work. Since they can hop into a virtual career fair from their mobile device without downloading any apps, it’s a quick and painless way to explore their career options.
This format also gives you a leg up with candidates who aren’t particularly comfortable in social situations, allowing them to get to know you and learn about a new job from behind their laptop or smartphone before moving on to an in-person hiring event or interview. Making it easy for candidates to learn about what you have to offer is one of the best ways to both broaden and improve your talent pool.
Virtual Career Fairs Are Efficient, Decreasing Your Cost Per Lead
Know what costs money? Visiting candidates in person or investing in transportation to bring them to you. Even worse? Spending that money to vet a candidate who turns out to be a poor fit.
That’s why many organizations are using virtual career fairs to screen candidates before moving to the in-person interview. Virtual career fairs are a great way to get a feel for a person’s skills and experience and gain insight that goes way beyond their resume. Even more importantly, chatting online through a virtual career fair can help you and your candidates determine whether they might be a cultural fit for your company, a component that’s increasingly important to employers and job seekers alike.
Cost per lead is an essential metric for recruiters, and every good recruiter looks for ways to decrease it while still maintaining high-quality leads. We love hearing from recruiters who have used the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud to decrease costs, because that means we’re not only helping you do better work – we’re giving you a tool that improves the bottom line, too.
Avoid Traffic, Travel and Headaches
Perhaps the biggest perk of virtual career fairs is that you can take advantage of them without leaving your office. There’s no sitting in traffic and trying to stay calm when you realize you’re going to be late. Virtual career fairs mean no late-night flights across the country to meet with the latest must-have candidates. And you can say goodbye to fast food and uncomfortable hotel beds.
Real-time virtual career fairs aren’t just convenient for the candidate; they’re convenient for you. And we all know that the less time you have to spend in a car or on a plane or carting boxes of swag to a job fair, the happier you’ll be.
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