One of the biggest recent shifts from in-person to virtual recruiting has everyone looking for brand new strategies. As traditional recruiting tactics such as events and campus career fairs operate much differently this year, online career fair and other virtual events have completely become the new norm.
What Is An Online Career Fair?
An online career fair is simply a recruiting event where employers meet the recruiting bodies on a 3D online platform. It is a dynamic solution that helps employers break free from all the possible limitations of traditional hiring events.
An online career fair creates a branded digital environment while cutting some major expenses such as travel, food, and venue. When it comes to convenience, virtual career fairs are loaded with powerful customizable features such as galleries, bespoke exhibitor booths with downloadable content, and streamable videos.
Why Do Online Career Fairs Matter?
When looking to recruit, employers with a recognizable consumer brand can easily leverage their brand recognition. On the other hand, companies with limited employer brand awareness will need to do more than just show up to stand out.
Online career fairs offer a variety of important opportunities to increase employer brand awareness and stand out as a great place to work. Here are just a few of the benefits you get from hosting an online career fair:
- Expanded reach: you can share your job listings with a global talent pool.
- Custom branding opportunities: your event venue is totally customizable, therefore offering you tons of space to showcase your brand.
- Easy virtual promotion: you can share sneak peeks of your virtual event across social, email and paid advertising channels!
- Easy connection: chat, file sharing, and links to your own landing pages make it easy for candidates to connect with your brand.
Online career fairs are able to optimize a candidate’s journey as they learn about your company, search for jobs, and interact with your team. Though it may feel intimidating at first, online career fair platforms should actually provide a seamless experience that leaves your candidates with a lasting impression of your brand. When executed correctly, they’ll facilitate smooth navigation in order to produce an immersive experience. Such platforms should also be intuitive enough to cater to the most tech-averse of candidates.
There is nothing challenging when it comes to seeing why the most sought-after employers are already investing so much effort into delivering the best online career fair experience. Doing so helps them in killing two birds with one stone as they make their organization come across as people-focused as possible.
5 Tips To Maximize Your Employer Brand
Ever wonder what employers are looking for during these online recruiting sessions? and how can you stand out from the crowd? Keep scrolling to learn what you seek.
Below are five tips to showcase your employer brand effectively at your next online career fair:
1. Set Goals
Before you start to plan career fair ideas such as your booth setup or promotional strategy, it is crucial to begin by setting focused career fair goals. Some of the most impactful career fair tips can be found in these questions:
- What type of candidates are you looking to attend this particular event?
- How many candidates are you hoping to speak with?
- What is your expected percentage of the candidates to continue on to the next step of submitting a resume? or being offered an interview?
- What are the overall goals for your organization?
Your answer to these questions will greatly help guide your actions in each step that follow. Furthermore, the answers will also help you in determining the return on your investment (ROI) after the fact and assessment. You’ll get to know whether it’s a good idea to participate in the event again or not.
2. Team Up with the Right Platform
If you desire to truly deliver an impactful online career fair, it is important to team up with a virtual platform that understands your unique needs. It should be able to develop a bespoke solution that works according to your requirements along with providing outstanding customer support.
Most importantly, the platform must ensure that they will help you in constructing an online career fair that will let you enjoy three animated hands on top of each other, such as via 3-D avatars, creative virtual booth displays, great screen transitions, or ideal marketing collateral. In short, the more effort you put, the stronger the employer brand you will cast.
3. Delegate Tasks Wisely
Now that you’re registered to the best virtual platform for the online career fair, it’s time to decide who can help you with each aspect of event planning, setup, and even who will be available during the event. While you do have a dedicated project manager with vFairs, you may need teammates to manage things like technical setup, marketing and content, and user management. This all depends on the complexity of your event, and your team’s bandwidth.
On the day of the event, it is good to select your career fair staffers according to what makes sense based on your specific goals. For example, If it’s a university career fair, you need to choose alumni of the school. On the other hand, if it’s a neighborhood fair, you will select team members who live nearby or grew up in that same area.
Also, ensure your recruiters working the career fair event are armed with a piece of significant knowledge. They should be well aware of the prominent goals above along with the key talking points relevant to your company. As online career fairs are not so easy to process, it is important that your staff be energized and enthusiastic. The staff members must be prepared to talk to a large number of prospects online throughout the day.
4. Pay Close Attention to Booth Reps
Nothing is more important than the people manning your virtual booths. This is because they play the biggest role at the online career fair in developing your employer brand. Your event attendees will surely be interacting with the booth reps in order to get all the information they need about your organization. Also, the majority of the people will be turning to the chat room much longer before accessing your actual content knowledge base.
In delivering your employer brand, this two-way interaction is pivotal, hence keep these tips in mind:
- It is essential to have someone manning every open chat forum. This should be done throughout the duration of the online career fair. So that you are able to solve candidate queries in real-time.
- Your query response time must be under two minutes. This is because only then you will be able to maximize the chances of capturing a prospective lead.
- Most importantly, never forget to treat your candidates like customers. The more effort is put by your booth reps into satisfying the attendees, the more favorable employer brand your event will surely cast.
5. Make Sure Your Content is Tailored to Your Audience
Another great tip is to include a wide variety of content formats on your virtual booths along with the help desks. This will help establish your organization as a leader in the industry. Employee testimonials, benefits plans, even photos of your offices will help build hype amongst applicants. Also, aim for informative and well-edited videos shedding light on your departments and corporate culture. You can also showcase your work-life in this manner.
Additionally, you can upload slide decks, sound bites, infographics, and short blog articles. This is important to keep the candidates well acknowledged about the work environment that they will be interacting with.
Conclusion
While we enter a new and much-evolving reality in talent acquisition, one thing remains consistent. That is; job seekers always wish to work for employers that care about them and their careers.
With this point in mind, you need to set your employer apart from others. You can do this by showcasing your very best. And being one of the first to master the entire virtual experience. As employers can’t afford to enter this territory unprepared or fall behind on new strategies, the need to digitally adapt is now the top consideration. You are not alone in this journey.
The team at vFairs built a new end-to-end solution to help you in making the shift from in-person to virtual sourcing, hires, engagement, and recruiting much easier. To learn how to partner with us and get an expert advisor to help extend your team and online career fair experience, click here.
