How to Design a Virtual Job Fair
Sourcing right-fit candidates is a daunting challenge, and many recruiters are feeling the pressure. In 2020, COVID-19 disrupted many business practices across the globe, with heavy hits to employee retention and hiring rates. Many recruiters turned from traditional interviews, job fairs, and mass hiring events, and explored virtual tools instead. Since the onset of the pandemic, 45% of employers have increased their use of virtual hiring events.
Table of Contents 1.
Define Your Strategy
2.
Set the Stage
3.
Prioritize Pre-Event Engagement
4.
Host Your Virtual Job Fair
5.
Measure Engagement and Event Success
6.
Add Virtual Events to Your Recruiting Arsenal
The Lynchpin of Success
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%
If recruiters want to keep up with the hiring curve, they need more than a basic online job board or Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Instead, they should look to capitalize on the rise in virtual hiring with virtual job fairs designed to connect candidates and employers from anywhere in the world.
remain virtual
This eBook covers every step in the process of designing and delivering engaging virtual hiring events, from your initial event strategy to postevent performance tracking.
of recruiting will
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Beyond the rapid increase in virtual hiring over the past year, experts believe the trend is here to stay; they predict that 80% of recruiting will remain virtual for the foreseeable future.
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How to Design a Virtual Job Fair
Step One: Define Your Strategy Before you can start planning your job fair, you need buy-in from your teams. First, make your recruiters and hiring managers comfortable with the idea of virtual job fairs. Ask for suggestions on how to make it effective. Involve your recruiters as you plan the event, especially when it comes to scheduling time for teams to engage with online visitors during the event. If you are comfortable with media activity for your job fairs, get the word out to the media in regions where you want to attract employees. Next, establish quantitative and qualitative goals for your job fair, considering things like: X
How many attendees you’d expect to see at the event
X
Which types of candidates you want to reach
X
How you’ll define conversion — resume submission, post-event contact, hiring, etc.
X
Which success metrics you’ll track
These goals will not only be valuable in how you plan your event, attract sponsors, and create content, but they’ll also define benchmarks as you analyze performance after each event. Finally, don’t forget to identify how you’ll measure each activity in and out of your event platform. Ideally, you’ll be able to track critical metrics directly in your platform and create custom reports to share with stakeholders and event organizers. With your team on board and clear goals in mind, decide where and how you will promote your event. For example, you may base promotional details on which locations have open positions to fill, or you may choose to engage a global audience in a remote work model. Since changes on a virtual booth take very little time or effort, you can even create something like a roadshow, customizing the information on your virtual booth based on what region you are focusing on during a particular week. Before you start rolling out agendas or publishing ads for your next job fair, you need to define and prepare your content. Think about what you’ll produce in-house, as well as which content pieces — like webinars, live streams, or downloadable assets — will come from your sponsors. Establish a production schedule that accounts for:
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X
Topic approval
X
Production time
X
The creation of downloadable content
X
Sponsor handoff
X
Uploading content to your virtual environment
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How to Design a Virtual Job Fair
Step Two: Set the Stage Find a technology provider who will offer your virtual job fair as a hosted service. Once you gain momentum and if the volume of activity justifies it, you can even consider having a custom-designed fair installed on your own servers. Look for experienced providers who can steer you through pitfalls. Seek simplicity with a short learning curve for your users. Ease of use and responsive customer support is critical to ensuring that all participants leave satisfied.
Have the virtual job fair site ready before the first announcement goes out. Even when you’re scrambling for time, ensure that visitors can complete the pre-registration process when they receive an invite. If you plan to use a virtual job fair for the long haul, you are better off owning a URL that you can brand, e.g., www.yourcompany.com/virtual-job-fair, and use that in all your promotions, even if you are going to use a shared virtual job fair venue.
Alternatively, subscribe to a shared venue. One of the main advantages of a shared virtual job fair is the low cost of subscribing to one. The other advantage is the ease of launching a virtual event in a shared venue. For example, if you just need a quick fix for hiring in one specific department, a shared venue can have you up and running in a couple of hours.
As you put together your pre-event website content and start building the heart of your job fair on the backend, consider the following quick tips:
Nail down a date for your job fair. You may have gotten initial buy-in from coworkers and leadership teams, but now it’s time to ensure they’ll be able to support your event. On the flip side, your pool of potential job candidates must be able to schedule a time and mark their calendars in advance. This is also a great time to schedule a recurring series of virtual job fairs to make them a part of the job seeker’s lexicon and job-search habit.
The key to your virtual event’s success lies in the technology you use to host it.
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How to Design a Virtual Job Fair
X
Consider value for attendees. Unless something truly adds value to your virtual job fair, avoid it — even if your vendor offers it for free.
X
Avoid useless surprises. Avoid startling your audience with a loud video or audio message that plays as soon as they enter a specific area.
X
Choose simple demos. Help users prepare for the virtual job fair with quick-to-load demos and easy to view without special software installations.
X
Offer dedicated support resources. You can never include too many ‘Help’ buttons. Display an easy way to contact you for help on every page and even in the footer.
Create a schedule. Your virtual job fair will be considered a success if job candidates find a knowledgeable recruiter or hiring manager available to get their questions answered immediately during pre-announced hours. You might consider breaking down your virtual event into hourly sessions by rotating staff and content types. Virtual events give you the flexibility to integrate multiple content formats into each day. With options like: X
Video testimonials
X
Downloadable content offers
X
1-1 breakout sessions or interviews
X
On-demand presentations
X
Live streams
Your virtual event environment should allow you to point to existing information without duplicating effort. However, be mindful of information overload. Not all people want to read or watch pre-recorded videos all day. It’s safe to assume that even if the information is offered on the virtual job fair site, visiting job candidates may prefer to chat with a recruiter to obtain a level of comfort.
Step Three: Prioritize Pre-Event Engagement Scale your attendance goals. Multiply by 20 — if you want 1,000 visitors to attend your virtual fair, then invite 20,000. This rule of thumb will help you not only in preparing your invitation list, but also in tempering the expectations of your sponsors. However, there are always exceptions, so it’s essential to research attend ance trends in your industry. For example, virtual job fairs in academic settings such as Universities do not always follow this rule, especially during graduation season. Stick to what you know. If you have traditionally used email to contact your potential participants, then stick with it. Remember, your goal is to attract the best candidates for the positions that the hiring managers seek to fill and engage them in conversation when they visit online. However, steer clear of automated responses that may never reach the intended recipient. Besides asking your participants to white-list the email addresses that the job fair will use, be prepared to offer support via phone.
Tell all the participants what to expect. If you are holding a virtual job fair, the least you can do for the job candidates is to ensure that hiring managers and recruiters are seriously seeking the candidates. Ensure that the virtual booths are staffed according to a pre-announced schedule. This may take the form of real individuals who are qualified recruiters or hiring managers logging into dedicated chat rooms or chat channels. Sometimes, that could simply be using tools such as Skype to answer questions from job candidates instantly. Pre-screen job applicants. The better tools in the market will allow you to pre-screen the job candidates even as you meet them online in a chat room. Keep the conversation brief and professional. Guide the job candidates in the right direction if they do not meet your standards. Recruiters who use virtual job fairs usually like to stay away from videos or images of job candidates to steer clear of possible concerns of discrimination during their hiring process. Consider registration filters. To improve the quality of traffic in your virtual job fair, make a filter a part of your job candidate pre-registration process. Only those who answer certain questions correctly will move on to register and upload their resumes to your virtual job fair. Design the questions thoughtfully so that visitors cannot game the filter. This will help funnel the rightfit candidates to your event and prove the event’s value back to sponsors and external recruiters in attendance.
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How to Design a Virtual Job Fair
Step Four: Host Your Virtual Job Fair Convey a Sense of Gathering We are now entering the live phase of a virtual job fair. In a virtual job fair, most participants are geographically dispersed. If you do not have at least 20 or 25 users simultaneously gathered in the same area inside the job fair, it will look scarce. You don’t need intricate flying formations of avatars or one-on-one introductions to keep participants engaged, but here are a few ways to build a sense of connectivity — even though you and your participants are not physically in the same location.
Encourage communication. Have a place where participants can come in, leave a comment, hang around, and chat with others. Call it an online coat-check or a welcome wall, with embedded live chat modules and chat icons throughout each event to keep participants connected. Leave no chat room unstaffed. If you have a chat room, make sure you have at least one official to steer any conversation. Keep it short and sweet. The shorter the duration of the live event, the better the quality of the gathering will be. When participants know that recruiters will be online and waiting for no more than two hours, they will set aside time online for live interaction. The more participants engage in live exchanges, the more likely they are to walk away with valuable connections and opportunities. Don’t send them away empty-handed. The value of your event lies in the connections attendees make, but that’s not the only thing you can offer them. Consider bringing in career consultants – they could even be in their own virtual booths – to provide free career advice, resume critiques, or free interview tips. This will do wonders for your brand and create immeasurable goodwill towards your organization and its products or services.
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How to Design a Virtual Job Fair
Step Five: Measure Engagement and Event Success The ultimate goal of your job fair is to hire new employees. Be sure to keep a record of job candidates who moved to the next step in the hiring process to determine the return on the investment and effort for the virtual job fair. You can also use the virtual job fair reports to improve future events. Your platform ought to track the activity of every click of the mouse in the fair. Analyze it to identify popular or unpopular features in the job fair, and measure overall success based on the goals you set in step one. Beyond complex data, you can learn a lot about your event’s success by gathering qualitative insights from those who attended. Send out polls and surveys: X
Before an event to find out what participants want most from the job fair
X
During an event to measure how content resonates with them
X
After an event to see how participants respond to the fair itself and the platform
These insights help you measure ROI per event and adjust your strategies to deliver a next-level experience as you grow and expand your virtual hiring efforts.
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How to Design a Virtual Job Fair
Step Six: Add Virtual Events to Your Recruiting Arsenal Virtual job fairs may never fully replace conventional ones. However, they introduce several useful capabilities and technologies that give candidates and recruiters a well-rounded pre-screening experience. When you want to bring together a possible match quickly with little time, expense, or effort, there is nothing better than a nicely arranged virtual job fair environment. So, here are some closing thoughts: X
Set realistic expectations. The field of utilizing virtual environments is relatively new, and it’s evolving. Stay level-headed and roll out new features slowly to ensure success.
X
Be patient with your participants. Give them time to learn your platform and immerse themselves in the emerging world of virtual events.
X
Keep your branding in mind. Give each job fair your own personal stamp. Find a virtual events vendor that can wrap the experience around your needs.
About 6Connex Virtual Event Solutions
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Pick and choose the pieces that work for your organization. Know what you can handle, and find a virtual job fair provider who can support your unique recruiting needs.
Our Digital Experience
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Add virtual job fairs to your recruiting strategy. Make it a part of your company’s hiring process. When done with simplicity, the learning curve is short, and the benefits huge.
Your virtual job fair must be flexible enough to move from one tool to the other in an agile fashion, always keeping an eye on the event’s purpose: to find the best match between the job opening and the job candidate.
The Lynchpin of Success The success of your virtual job fair lies in how effectively it connects participants and employers. However, it takes more than a desire to hire new employees or a need to support your sponsors to create a sustainable virtual hiring strategy. Nearly 50% of marketers believe that audience engagement is the biggest contributor to virtual event success, which means everything from your outreach strategy to your choice in technology partner should tie back to your participants: the candidates at your job fair.
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How to Design a Virtual Job Fair
6Connex is the leading provider of virtual and hybrid event solutions. Our secure, cloud-based platform expands audience reach and drives in-depth content engagement for marketing, sales, recruitment, training, and HR communities to make for successful online events around the world. Our product portfolio includes virtual environments, learning management, and webinars. Demand more from your virtual and hybrid event solution. Request a virtual event demo with 6Connex, or contact our event software experts for more information. www.6Connex.com Have Questions? Please call 1.800.395.4702 or email us at sales@6connex.com.