6 Tips to Showcase Your Employer Brand at a Virtual Career Fair

If you plan to make the most out of your virtual recruiting event, it’s best to treat it more like a future employee’s orientation into your company than a run of the mill CV collecting opportunity. Some of the most successful Online Career Fairs are the ones that optimize a candidate’s journey across the virtual platform. These platforms are mobile-friendly enabling wider reach, facilitating smooth navigation to produce an immersive experience and are intuitive enough to cater to the most tech-averse of candidates as well.

It’s not hard to see why the most sought-after employers invest so much effort into delivering a great Virtual Career Fair experience. It helps them kill two birds with one stone. They make their organization come across as people-focused thereby bolstering their employer brand and attract an infinite pool of job applicants serving the eventual goal.

Here are the top 6 tips to showcase your employer brand effectively at your next Virtual Career Fair:

1. Build anticipation beforehand
2. Partner with a competent virtual events platform provider
3. Incorporate rich content formats
4. Pick your booths reps wisely 
5. Make webinars your friends
6. Hero storytelling

Let’s dig a little deeper into each one of these tips to nail employer branding in 2020.

1. Build anticipation beforehand

As with any significant event, building pre-event hype is crucial. Any efforts dedicated to building an audience prior to the event not only ensures a larger event turnout but also contributes favorably towards your employer brand.

• If you’re looking to fill very specific vacancies, try to tap into niche groups on platforms like Meetup and GroupSpaces well before your Virtual Career Fair. Participate in conversations to spread the word about your upcoming event and what makes it worth attending.
• If, on the other hand, you’re looking to reel in a broader and more diverse applicant base, utilize social media to run promotions that are targeted towards your key demographic.
• Another great alternative is to collaborate with social media influencers and bloggers to promote your virtual career fair and benefit from their reach and following.

2. Partner with a competent virtual events platform provider

• To truly deliver an impactful virtual career fair, you need to work with a team that understands your unique needs, develops a bespoke solution according to your requirements and provides great customer support.
• Most importantly, however, ensure that they help you construct a Virtual Career Fair that lets you display great visuals – be it through 3-D avatars, great screen transitions, creative virtual booth displays or killer marketing collateral. The more effort you put into making the virtual platform visually resonate with your corporate culture, the stronger employer brand you will cast.
• Mirror reality – Some high-caliber platforms let you go as far as mimicking your actual office environment at the digital career fair. If you have a very recognizable office design or a receptionist that everyone is familiar with, having those spaces and avatars replicated in the virtual event can really make the difference in delivering a highly personalized career fair experience to your candidates.
• Display a 360-degree view – every serious applicant will be interested in knowing where they’d be working. Incorporate a 360-degree tour of your office at the Online Career Fair to provide a comprehensive virtual experience that falls completely in-line with your corporate culture. To get this done, all you need is a high-resolution camera and a virtual tour freeware and you’re all set.

3. Incorporate rich content formats

To establish your organization as a leader in the industry, include a variety of content formats on your virtual booths and help desks.

• Aim for well-edited and informative videos that shed light on your corporate culture, introduce your departments and showcase the work-life there.
• You can also upload slide decks, infographics, sound bites and short blog articles to keep the candidates intrigued about the work environment that they will be exposed to.

Read more about ways of defining a compelling Career Fair content strategy.

4. Pick your booth reps wisely

It goes without saying that the people manning your virtual booths play the biggest role in developing your employer brand at the online career fair. Your event attendees will be interacting with the booth reps to get all the information they need about your organization with most people turning to the chat room long before accessing your content knowledge base to learn more.

• This two-way interaction is pivotal in delivering your employer brand so keep these tips in mind:
• Make sure you have specialists manning all the booths, so no visitor leaves an interaction confused or unsatisfied
• Have someone manning every open chat forum throughout the duration of the Virtual Career Fair so you solve candidate queries in real-time
• Ensure that your query response time is under two minutes because then, you maximize the chances of capturing a prospective lead since their interest is still fresh
• Most importantly, treat your candidates like customers. The more effort your booth reps will put into satisfying the attendees, the more favorable and lasting employer brand your event will cast.

5. Make webinars your friend

Webinars are widely being used by organizations to disseminate information, boost event engagement and most importantly, position themselves as the industry thought leaders. They are the most popular digital tool used by B2B Marketers to generate strong leads and therefore, you should leverage this tool to convey your corporate message with maximum impact. In order to excel you company’s webinar sessions, keep in mind the following:

• Have your most qualified and eloquent employees conduct live webinars at the virtual career fair and have them introduce your organization, its culture, and mission to add the authenticity of human interaction.
• You can also invite expert guest speakers at the event to further solidify your organization’s authority on its operations.
• Keep these webinars roughly 45 minutes long for maximum impact and open the floor for a live Q&A session to amplify at-event engagement.

To learn more about this, read our article on why you need to compliment a webinar with a virtual event.

6. Hero storytelling

We’re all fans of great stories. You might have noticed that top companies like General Electric, Microsoft, and Nike are investing heavily in communicating their brand story. Having a strong narrative that weaves your corporate vision together with its current operations can be highly potent in this case. Develop a compelling narrative for your brand and leave a lasting impression by ultilizing:

• corporate videos
• employee testimonials
• client success stories

Conclusion

A great employer brand acts as a strong and consistent pull-strategy when it comes to employer marketing. It certainly requires dedicated effort and a coherent plan, but that investment pays off in spades when your organization attracts top performers in today’s highly competitive employment landscape. A Virtual Career Fair is one of your best bets at promoting your employer brand because it allows you to communicate with your core demographic in a highly personalized and immersive space, one that your attendees opted to participate in. Make the most of your next online career fair by discussing all these possibilities with your team and your virtual event provider and brace yourself for an event that will be a smashing success.

Want to learn more about virtual career fairs? Read “The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Career Fairs”. Or read more about our virtual career fair solution.