For many companies, bringing in qualified talent involves a lot of effort and consequent problems. Recruiters must sift through piles of resumes that need to be manually ported into an ATS, restrictive onsite venue hours, and administrative nightmares. Incidentally, the candidate experience doesn’t fare much better either. They have to deal with long queues, impersonal exchanges with recruiters, and a rush to cover as many booths as possible. This is exactly why in this age of automation, career fairs need a facelift to boost ROI.
Finding the right employer-employee match is a Herculean task. However, with the right tools and innovation to back up your event, the talent acquisition process becomes much easier. There are multiple ways to get creative with your career fairs. To help you get started, we’ve put together a list of solutions. These streamline talent acquisition and attract job seekers that you’ve been missing out on.
1. Go Virtual
A virtual career fair platform is an excellent innovation that is here to stay even with in-person events being back. You can look forward to tremendous cost savings, massive global outreach, and distraction-free one-on-one communication with applicants. In addition, you can enjoy tools such as CV shortlisting, on-spot video interviewing, video matchmaking, and round-the-clock event hosting convenience.
Virtual events are also a fantastic way to stay green and reduce carbon emissions by minimizing the need for travel and printed collateral. Global employers can hire people from around the world through a virtual setting and exchange resumes and other resources completely online.
A virtual career fair can also run for days with evergreen content available on-demand as you like. Employers and organizers get access to live and post-event data that an in-person event will not be able to replicate.
2. Set Up a Hybrid Event
If you want a physical element in your career fair, you can run a hybrid career fair that is the best of both worlds. You can complement your physical event with a custom-branded event page to share valuable resources. These can include webinars highlighting company culture, multimedia content, interviewing advice, best resume writing practices, etc. So, your visitors will arrive at the hybrid career fair equipped with the knowledge they need.
You can give attendees access to all these resources on the go through a mobile event app. These are absolutely great tools to have for a hybrid career fair as they can make your event much more engaging, boost attendance, and make it mobile-friendly.
What’s spectacular about this approach is that you can spearhead inclusivity and accessibility for your visitors. You can follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to target an extended volume of talent. Add various accessibility features like close captioning, transcriptions, screen readers, and color contrasts. From visual impairment to hearing disabilities, you can address it all and leave a brilliant mark on your exhibitors and attendees alike.
3. Collect Resumes Instantly with QR Codes
Recruiters can really save time if they have the facility to see a list of plausible candidates in one go. Instead of cumbersome paper-based CV exchanges between HR executives and candidates, a sure-shot way to improve the event experience is by incorporating smart CV capture tools like a QR code scanner.
A mobile event app is an excellent tool to overcome the hassles of managing paper-based resumes, manual data entry woes, and painfully slow shortlisting decisions. Simply put, these decisions add no value to the recruitment cycle. Instead, user profiles serve the purpose more conveniently. Participants will enter their CVs and other professional information during registration through the custom fields that organizers can set up. All this information is consolidated in the form of a unique QR code for each user profile. Recruiters and other participants at the event simply have to scan the QR code to receive the complete user profile.
4. Build Buzz with AI Marketing Tools
Low attendance is a fear most hosts experience. However, with the right marketing efforts, you can ensure that your career fair is a success. Building your brand visibility and awareness is not an overnight mission and takes a fair bit of effort.
Therefore, we recommend using AI-powered marketing tools like ChatGPT to create content for landing pages, emails, press releases, social media, and so much more. Meanwhile, you’ll stay in control of the content.
vFairs AI Assistant can become your marketing sidekick and help create marketing collateral in minutes that otherwise take days. You can still stay in control of the content by providing appropriate prompts and editing the responses. This way, you can ensure it’s accurate, uniquely branded, and most importantly, social media-friendly.
5. Digitalize Job Listings & Highlight Important Jobs
Hosts can make things much easier for recruiters and job seekers. You can create online job listings for all your hybrid and virtual career fairs by coordinating with recruiters. Then, showcase them in prominent areas of the virtual platform. Applicants can see which positions suit them and only visit the relevant booths. This way, the whole event becomes much more streamlined, with the appropriate matchmaking factors involved.
You can also highlight the most sought-after jobs at the career fair by marking them as featured. These jobs can be promoted more through the platform and will always stay on top of the job list. As a result, companies can fill the most important job roles first.
6. Build a Community
Career fairs that lack a sense of community don’t leave a lasting impression on attendees. You can change that by adding a live event feed to your event. Attendees can post pictures and start discussions through the live feed which makes the event much more social. Community-building activities can enhance attendance and boost overall engagement with the event as well.
You can also boost community building through social media by adding a LinkedIn community builder integration. Job seekers who wish to attend the event will be prompted to become a part of the career fair’s LinkedIn community page as well. This is where like-minded professionals from various industries can come together, join a discussion, or share their thoughts. Recruiters can also connect with each other in a much more relaxed and social setting. Attendees can share interview tips with each other, share resources, and help other community members find the right job for them.
7. Integrate with Popular ATS
Managing all your data in one place can make the lives of career fair organizers a lot easier. It can help reduce the time it takes to collect, interview, shortlist, and hire potential candidates after they’ve applied through the event platform.
Virtual or hybrid event platforms like vFairs can integrate with the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) of your choice to make sure that all your data is organized and easily accessible. It reduces the effort to download all the data from one platform and then upload it to another manually. You can simply export it in a few easy steps and track all job applications seamlessly.
8. Connect Ideal Users with Smart Matchmaking
Connecting recruiters with the right candidates through a career fair can be one of the biggest challenges for you as an organizer. However, adding a video smart matchmaking feature to your virtual and hybrid career fairs can change the game. It works like a charm and connects people with their best matches online.
So how does the smart matchmaking feature work? You set up a bunch of questions that each attendee will need to answer when they click on the matchmaking module. Then, when the answers for two users match, they get connected through a timed video call. They can mutually decide to increase the duration of the call or end it based on how it’s going.
Most attendees at your event will prefer smart matchmaking features to quickly connect them to the right person, as seen in this LinkedIn poll as well.
9. Focus on Enhancing User Experience
Great user experience is the key to any successful career fair. You need to focus on adding virtual career fair features that will create an unforgettable experience for your attendees, whether they are job seekers or recruiters. Here are some of the ways you can create a better experience for event attendees.
Meeting Scheduler
Organizing job applications and shortlisting suitable resumes is the biggest challenge for all recruiters at such events. Therefore, adding a meeting scheduler or a chat booking widget can help them track all their booked meetings in one place. This can be equally beneficial for job seekers as well because they don’t have to worry about a missed meeting with a recruiter and can plan their entire day.
Job and Booth Bookmarks
Job seekers at your event will most likely be interested in more than one job. However, a bigger event means that there can be a lot of entries in the job post listing and hundreds of booths which can be difficult to track. Therefore, one small but mighty feature to add to your web and mobile platform is bookmarking. Attendees can save jobs and booths they are interested in, to their bookmarks, and get back to them at a later time.
Event Agenda
An event agenda should include all sessions, event information, and important announcements that job seekers should know about. Attendees can also add a live session on the agenda to their personal calendars and plan their day accordingly so they don’t miss out on anything.
Resume Downloads
Recruiters need to sort out hundreds and thousands of resumes between all the different roles that they are hiring for. Therefore, you should make sure that there is a way for them to view, download, and then shortlist applicants’ resumes. vFairs allows recruiters to download the resumes of all applicants with just one click. The resumes are also grouped on the basis of job posts making it convenient for recruiters to sift through them.
Inclusive Avatars
It might not feel like the most important thing but adding inclusive avatars can really level up your career fair. Applicants can come from all over the world with different backgrounds and cultures. Seeing an avatar in the virtual platform that represents them can not only boost confidence but also create a sense of belonging and inclusion. It can also help recruiting companies create a firm image as equal-opportunity employers.
Get Instant Feedback
Attendee feedback and event analytics can be crucial to gauge event success and make better decisions. You can add polls for each session, video, or presentation separately with the vFairs platform. Poll results can be an instant debrief opportunity for organizers and can help you get a pulse on what the attendees like or dislike.
What’s Next?
The career fair landscape is changing for the better. Using the right automation tools to attract, engage and hire the best talent has become undeniably desirable. There are now slick solutions that efficiently build potential employee pipelines, provide detailed analytics, and create the right buzz. They can help boost branding, deliver fantastic user experiences, and give both job seekers and recruiters a global reach. So, whether you go virtual, hybrid, or onsite, make sure you provide attendees with an experience that’s memorable and valuable.
