Virtual Career Fair Hosting: Checklist For Running Seamless Operations

The big day is here! You’ve meticulously fine tuned your event planning, gathered exhibitors  requirements, implemented customizations, and cross checked every detail that matters. But before you get ready to open doors for visitors to experience the virtual career fairmagic, there’s an operational strategy that needs to be in place to trigger positive momentum and a vibrant guest experience. Want some quick advice on what best practices to follow as a part of your a well defined operational strategy? Let’s jump right in: 1) Ensure ample staffing for chat support: Whether you’re hosting the virtual career fair to drive personal recruitment, or have a roster of exhibitors ready for superior talent acquisition, there is staff required to man the virtual booths. To cultivate an event environment encouraging proactive communication and information exchange, job seekers should be able to initiate conversations with recruiters and booth reps using the audio, video and text based chat functionalities. If the event is scheduled to run for days or weeks, pre-scheduled chat hours can be displayed as a part of the booth design to ensure that visitors are aware of the timings (and corresponding time zones) in which live conversations with staff are possible. Failing to secure proper staffing will drastically damage the visitor experience, leaving attendees with inadequate information and unanswered questions which will in turn poorly reflect on the employer’s brand (a big no no).

2) Real-time technical support:

Like all other events you’ve hosted, there is always a possibility of your guests running into an unanticipated problem or glitch that needs to be resolved immediately. This is why having real-time technical support on call is vital for the virtual career fair to continue running without a hitch. Your vendor should provide live assistance to enable easy communication between the host and their team during the event duration. This not only helps spearhead a spectacular visitor experience amongst the talent, employers and even guest speakers, but supports all attendees in making best use of their virtual career fair participation.

3) Set up an Information Desk:

Not all your visitors or exhibitors will be seasoned virtual event experts, it’s only natural that questions will arise, and support will be needed to facilitate easy career fair participation. This is why staffing your virtual Information Desk with an employee well acquainted with the platform is essential to deliver outstanding guest services. This way visitors will be able to share queries and get their responses in real-time without having to face any unwanted inconvenience or delays. Bonus Tip: Create an event FAQ document available for quick downloading. A little effort will go a long way to leave visitors impressed with this display of foresight. Perhaps consider hiring interns to help achieve this objective without ballooning your costs.

4) Run real time reminders:

When running an action packed event with a lot of content for guests to consume, hosts have to take extra measures to help attendees keep up and actively participate in scheduled events. For example, live banners counting down time till the next webinars, or banners steering traffic towards event spaces such as the networking lounge for a special Q&A session can serve as signals for the audiences to explore the platform. Furthermore, these reminders can build webinar views and chat volumes, both powerful indicators of audience engagement.

5) Don’t forget to get social:

To drive job seekers to your virtual career fair and build active buzz around it, offer incentives and run contests. Hosts can take steps to incentivize visitors to share the event with others via social check-ins in order to strengthen not just employer branding, but in turn boost visibility on social media platforms (e.g. facebook, twitter, linkedin).

6) Add a touch of gamification:

By incorporating competitions such as a leaderboard to award sponsored prizes to guests based on activity, or a scavenger hunt across the event platform to facilitate giveaways, job seekers will be more invested in staying logged in for longer. Solving the struggles of audience retention, building excitement and challenge into your operational strategy will attract high job seeker traffic at all times. 7) Include interactive webinars: Truly want to harness the power of the virtual career fair to encourage dialogue? Add at least 1 webinar session with a live Q&A feature. The speakers can discuss topics of their expertise, meanwhile allowing the audience to ask questions from the comfort of their desktop or mobile devices. To get started, first select your speakers, setup a schedule beforehand, promote it, ensure that the speakers are trained on using the software, and also setup policies for the webinar (such as time limits). Making two way communication an easy to pursue priority, this effort will dramatically reduce the chances of a bored and unenthusiastic guest experience. To really go above and beyond to deliver a smash hit webinar, provide attendance incentives such as discount offerings, etc. Also remember, have technical assistance ready in case support is needed.

Conclusion:

With your virtual career fair in full swing, incorporating these recommendations into your event strategy will make it a smash hit. While job seekers explore vacancies and employers screen candidates to shortlist best contenders, hosts can get creative with gamification to amp up their audience engagement. Ensuring ample staffing, live tech and guest support, dynamic banners, social media activity, and interactive webinars are just a few of the other techniques to really push your event’s caliber to the top ranks.

Want to learn more about Virtual Career Fairs? Read “The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Career Fairs”.