[Webcast Recap]: Best Practices for Virtual Career Fairs

vFairs continues its Epic Events webcast series with its 4th edition: Best Practices for Virtual Career Fairs. Recruiting professionals who have been using virtual career fairs but still might feel lost could truly benefit from this episode. It can help them with some actionable steps to better plan their events.

Moderated by our very own Wasif Arshad from the Sales Team at vFairs, the webcast took off with a great lineup of panelists. 

These included Cora Buckner, Senior Manager Strategic Alliances and Talent Acquisition and Ediz Gur Gocenoglu, Senior Manager Down Acquisitions Rapid Diagnostics from Abbott. They were accompanied by Jasmine Takeshita from San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, Director of Down Acquisition and Kyle Anderson, Director of Casino Executive Communications, Yaamava Resort & Casino.

They gave us a quick rundown for pre, during and post recruitment fair best practices. 

Should you want to watch this for yourself, we have the whole recording here for you on demand.

You can also find some key takeaways in this blog. 

What Are the Goals of Virtual Career Fairs?

The panelists began the webcast by sharing their main goals for conducting recruiting events through a virtual career fair platform. Between them they identified similar goals, depending on their company and target audience. These goals were namely:

• Employer branding 
• Attracting talent
• Promoting employment proposition
• Hiring 
• Creating an interactive platform
• Curating an enjoyable and attractive experience
• Assist applicants to get to know people particularly internally
• Be able to mimic a real life experience
• Give a glimpse into the company, its culture and values
• Creating a connection between the candidate and the company

How Important is Networking for Recruiters?

Panelists highlighted how these virtual career fairs become more than a job application platform. Some people come there to learn, and not apply immediately. It is these individuals who form a pipeline and become a ‘gift that keeps on giving’. Recruiters return to these resources and use them to pass on the message within their own networks. 

How to Best Leverage Marketing Campaigns?

Whilst discussing marketing campaigns, they all agreed that social media is crucial to all marketing, especially recruitment. For a general mass media reach, Facebook is still top of the social media channels. However they stressed that it largely depends on the target audience. 

For corporate messaging, they all agreed that LinkedIn was the best platform. Ediz highlighted that it varies with age groups and also between countries. The first goal of a marketing campaign is to identify your target audience and the right channel for that group. 

One has to keep the audience with constant and quality content. Especially nearer to the event date. As Cora said, there is no such thing as over communicating in the days leading up to your event. Yet she said, ‘content is king’. Good quality content is what will draw your audience in even on the day of the event.

What Are the Key Benefits of Virtual Career Fairs?

Panelists identified the ultimate ROI was to reach the target audience and create a pipeline that can be a continuous relationship going forward i.e create a vast network. They gain instant access to top talent. 

The quality of hire far exceeds itself through the global reach. This is only possible because the virtual platform can give access to, for instance, 200 schools in one day. A feat impossible to achieve in a physical setting. This way they also gain a diverse pool of candidates. The broader the reach the better it is. The more access to diversity of candidates in every sense of the word.

However, the other aspect they gain is insight that then better informs future events. Such as:

1. How many people registered and were actually active on the platform during the event?
2. How many people had live chats or downloaded materials?
3. How many people actually applied for a job?
4. What feedback was returned in the survey? 
5. Was the event purposeful and helpful in participant careers?
6. Where are attendees spending the most time?
7. Do you need to expand your content library? 

What Are Any Career Fair Tips?

Panelists identified these major best practices for running a successful event:

1. A dry run rehearsal day is key 
2. Always be prepared for what is going to go wrong 
3. It takes a village to organize, so make sure you have an internal support team
4. Make sure your speakers are familiar with the platform – best to have a dry rehearsal run with them as well
5. Be prepared that your visitors might be unprepared and won’t know how to best utilize the career fair 
6. Follow up post event
7. Keep all your notes for future events so you aren’t re-inventing the wheel each time.

Wrapping Up

The webcast eventually transitioned into the virtual giveaways of the amazon $50 dollar gift card within the live audience. With clear insight into pre, during and post event phases, the panelists were able to offer the audience a window into the world of virtual career fairs!