A hiring event playbook is fast becoming an essential component of a successful talent acquisition strategy. On a tactical level, it acts as a guide to help your recruiting team and hiring managers plan events to support specific hiring goals. But having a playbook can also help you garner support from your executive team, set expectations across the organization and demonstrate the value of your HR tech investments.
What Is a Hiring Event Playbook?
A hiring event playbook is a place to capture your proactive and reactive talent acquisition strategies specific to recruiting events, both in-person and/or virtual. This would include information on types of events you have hosted as well as the frequency of those events, staffing requirements and expected outcomes. Many of our customers include a menu of options for events in their playbooks, with preset packages that help hiring managers and recruiters determine which approach will work best for the current hiring objectives. Including screenshots and cost breakdowns can help illustrate value and satisfy the curiosities of all your internal stakeholders.
Essential Components of a Hiring Event Playbook
To offer maximum benefit, a hiring event playbook will ideally include the following pieces.
Recruiting event objectives:
Starting with the objectives of the recruiting team or hiring manager’s needs is critical, because there are so many types of hiring events you can host, and you can tailor your strategy to support one or many goals, from candidate engagement, to speeding up screening, to driving hiring outcomes, and so many more.
Target audiences:
For most TA teams, there are likely a number of potential audiences you are trying to reach throughout the year, from highly targeted personas for particular roles, to specific talent pools. Identifying the target audience for each hiring event is critical, so include a section in your playbook for defining the audience and consider outlining the most common target audiences you reach to make this aspect of planning quick and easy. Include insights you may be able to gather from internal data, like your best marketing sources to reach these audiences, to external talent pools you can leverage, as well as other information.
Types of events:
List the types of events included in your hiring event strategy. You may want to create separate sections for in-person events, virtual events and hybrid event types. Within each category, list the focus and components of each event type – such as recruiter chat, informational, interactive discussion and so on.
Cost considerations:
Breaking down the expenses associated with each event type is an important component for the decision-making process. Costs for in-person events can vary widely, with differing travel and accommodation costs (especially depending on the number of people staffing the event), venue fees and other expenses like refreshments and swag. Costs for virtual events tend to be more consistent, making it easier to incorporate them into your regular rotation.
Internal staffing needs:
The number of recruiters and hiring managers needed to execute each event type is another essential feature. This often depends on the number of candidates you anticipate meeting, which will vary based on your target audience and the type of event. For example, a large virtual screening event will require more staff members than an invite-only in-person event for prequalified candidates. Including this information in your playbook helps everyone plan accordingly.
Capacity for events:
All of the above information will help you estimate the volume and frequency of events your team can manage in a given month. In most cases, a TA team can expect to have a higher capability for virtual events than in-person events because there is no need for travel – and because recruiters and screeners can move candidates more quickly through the process.
Event setup and templates:
If you’re using a tool like the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud, list the existing event templates your team has created so you can easily find and clone them to make virtual event and in-person event registration a breeze. For in-person events, include the details for hosting these, from venue logistics to budgets and timelines, as these types of events take considerable time and coordination to execute.
Candidate engagement strategies:
What are the creative ways you are engaging talent at your hiring events? What features are your team using successfully to initiate conversations, create connections and drive hiring results? If you’re using a solution like Radancy’s Hiring Events, that makes it easy to host group video chats, transfer a conversation from a recruiter to a hiring manager, host informational broadcasts and more – create a section in your playbook that identifies each feature and how you’re using it. Bonus: This is also a great place to list fun and engaging ideas your team has used to differentiate your hiring events.
Event promotion and marketing:
There are likely several different strategies your team will use to market and promote events – from advertising them to candidates, to remarketing them to people who have already visited your career site, to directly sourcing candidates to events, to a more organic approach. Creating an overview of the different marketing tactics, budgets and target results can help you easily communicate the requirements and set realistic expectations for each event.
Data collection and measurement:
How will you track and measure the success of each hiring event? Create a checklist of the event configurations and requirements for event setup – from the questions you ask on registration forms, to what tracking URLs to set up, to what fields to use to properly map to your other candidate data. Also document how and when you’ll measure and report on each hiring event. Bonus: Add success stories from these measurements to your playbook so you can easily access these internal case studies to share for future planning needs.
Customer Examples of Hiring Event Strategies
As we mentioned earlier, many of our customers are using a hiring event playbook to guide their talent acquisition efforts and achieve their hiring goals. Recently, we hosted a webinar with TA experts from Amtrak, Abbvie and Raytheon who all shared stories that can help other organizations get the most out of their own hiring event playbooks.
Amtrak
One of the defining features of Amtrak’s TA strategy is hosting regular, recurring hiring events. On a monthly basis, their HR team hosts an event related to DEI issues, and they also have recurring ‘coffee chats’ on their calendar. Hosting events regularly sets expectations with candidates and gives them a sense of reliability, as well as offers more options so they can participate when it’s convenient for them – or when the featured topic aligns with their interests and values. With this model, Amtrak is free to scale up if they need to respond quickly to a high number of open requisitions due to a new project or expansion into a new location. Overall, they prioritize a set number of events per month based on what their staff is equipped to handle, so they are always aware of their bandwidth and can avoid overextending their team.
Remonda Youssef, Lead Recruitment Marketing at Amtrak, said: “We’ve been using hiring events as a central part of our strategy. They not only help us fill our roles, but we found that the candidates have enjoyed it, too, in making that human connection. With our recruiters and with our managers, we’ve used Radancy for our in-person events as well as our virtual events, and it’s been great for pipelining.”
Abbvie
The sixth-largest biomedical company by revenue, Abbvie invests heavily in early-career talent acquisition – so campus recruiting plays a large role. The rising costs and burdens associated with travel could have restricted their campus recruiting efforts, but Abbvie’s TA team found another way. They supplement in-person events with virtual career fairs, networking sessions and informational events to provide students and alumni with other options for engaging with the organization.
Meghan Gerritsen, Manager of Early Talent Pipeline Recruitment at Abbvie, said: “From an early talent lens, I’ve utilized hiring events in many ways over the last nine years of my career. Events help us market and brand the company, highlighting those opportunities and the programs we offer in very special ways, depending on how you target candidates or what the [focus of the] event is. There are so many types of hiring events, and each has its own benefit. My team mainly focuses on university relations and college campus events. We supplement with virtual events to allow us to have more of a reach and a broad audience across the country. In university relations, you can’t physically go everywhere. It’s physically not possible. So we’ve utilized Radancy’s technology to host virtual career fairs as part of our specific strategy.”
Raytheon
We’ve heard a lot of interesting feedback from Raytheon about their demand-driven event strategy. They plan events, backed up with their recruitment marketing strategy, and prioritize a cost-benefit analysis that helps them visualize internal staffing needs, expected outcomes and bottom-line costs. Benchmarking events in this way helps them plan future events based on performance of past events – and the data they can access through Radancy’s Hiring Events makes it painless to pull the reports they need to make these important judgment calls.
Sierra Rosen, Talent Attraction/Candidate Engagement Event Manager at Raytheon, said: “There’s just really so many benefits of a hiring event. Here at Raytheon, we have a lot of hard-to-fill positions. And really, at the end of the day, we’re trying to get those positions filled. And our recruiters and our sources on the team are so strong. But it’s still tough. With the hiring events, you really are able to reach so many more people. It’s great to be able to connect with a lot of people who you wouldn’t be able to connect with if you’re not able to travel everywhere all the time.”
Create Your Team’s Hiring Event Playbook
A hiring event playbook serves as a comprehensive roadmap, not only guiding tactical recruitment strategies but also showcasing the strategic prowess of the HR team. The benefits extend beyond aiding recruitment teams, encompassing crucial support from executives and highlighting the value of HR technology investments. Creating a hiring event playbook that works for your team and your organization helps you navigate the dynamic landscape of talent acquisition, take on new challenges and align your recruitment strategies with organizational objectives.
Recruiting Playbook FAQs
What is a recruiting playbook?
A recruiting playbook is a comprehensive document or set of guidelines that outlines the strategies, processes and best practices for an organization’s recruiting and hiring activities. It serves as a reference guide for recruiters, hiring managers and other stakeholders involved in the talent acquisition process. The playbook is designed to ensure consistency, efficiency and effectiveness in recruiting efforts.
What is a hiring event playbook?
A hiring event playbook is a structured guide that outlines the strategies, processes and best practices for planning, organizing and executing hiring events. These events are designed to attract, engage and assess potential candidates in a more dynamic and interactive setting than traditional recruiting methods. The playbook serves as a comprehensive resource for the recruitment team, providing a step-by-step framework to ensure the success of hiring events.
A well-constructed hiring event playbook helps ensure that the organization’s hiring events are strategic, well-executed and aligned with broader talent acquisition goals. It provides a structured approach for consistently delivering impactful and memorable experiences for both recruiters and candidates.
Why should hiring events be part of a recruiting playbook?
Integrating hiring events into a recruiting playbook is essential for organizations seeking to enhance their talent acquisition strategy. These events provide a unique opportunity for direct interaction with candidates, allowing recruiters to assess soft skills and cultural fit. By showcasing branded candidate experiences through presentations and interactive activities, hiring events attract candidates aligned with organizational values. They contribute to efficient talent sourcing, expedite the recruitment process and build a robust talent pipeline for future needs. Furthermore, hiring events support diversity and inclusion initiatives, foster positive candidate experiences and offer networking opportunities that extend beyond the event. The real-time feedback and data-driven insights generated during these events and accessible in the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud contribute to a more effective and streamlined recruitment process, ultimately helping organizations attract, engage and retain top talent.
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