What to Measure At & After a Virtual Career Fair?

So you’re busy patting your back after facilitating a tremendously successful recruitment event. Your virtual career fair precisely bridged the gap between the brightest of talent and available vacancies. It basically knocked the socks off employers eager to hire the best candidates. These are all promising signs of recruitment efforts gone well. However, if you truly want to measure success, numbers are your ultimate friend.

To make your virtual career fair post more insightful, you should track KPIs that reflect attendance, engagement, and hiring activity at and after the event. Then, compare these against your event goals to assess the impact. Look at numbers like actual hires confirmed, offers made, and offers accepted to determine insightful ROI.

What are some fundamental factors to track at the virtual career fair for both real-time and post-event analysis? Here’s what we recommend:

Virtual Career Fair Job Seeker Participation Statistics

Your attendees are the star of the show. This targeted audience draws in exhibiting businesses, hiring managers and recruiters. Thus, attracting and tracking job seeker participation makes a great first impression and spreads positive word of mouth to lure in more prospects:

1) Total registrations: Use a dedicated online landing page to facilitate event registrations (prior to the date the virtual career fair actually goes live). This is so hosts can benefit from a larger volume of attendee registrations versus a traditional recruitment event.

If your registration volume is high, that means your pre-event marketing worked well. Resultantly, you created the right buzz around the event among your target audience.

2) Total number of logged-in users: Come one, come all! Once your virtual career fair is in action, attendee traffic will be a great indicator to assess registration to attendee ratios. As you’ll already have their complete profiles with resumes, this metric is easy to measure.

3) Unique logins: To avoid and overlap between new and repeat visitors, you need to keep an eye on unique logins as a key statistic.

4) Total number of booth visits: A user-friendly and visually engaging virtual career fair platform will be a great incentive for job seekers. Such an event should offer highlights like webinars and well-staffed booths. These will encourage visitors to explore the features on offer. These can include exhibitor halls, job vacancies, and chats with exhibitor representatives. If booth visits are high, it means that the guests enjoyed the experience. This lets you improve your content strategy and also spearheads branding objectives.

Bonus Tip: Want to motivate your prospects to wholeheartedly participate in the virtual career fair? Incorporate leaderboards, awarding candidates different points for different actions across the event platform. For example, logging in can earn guests 10 points, viewing a video can earn 20, or visiting an exhibitor booth can earn 25 points. The guests with the highest activity recorded at the end of the event can receive sponsored prizes as a reward.

Employer Participation Statistics

The success of a virtual career fair is not just due to guest statistics, but also by the hiring organizations in attendance. Some essential statistics for participating employers include:

1) Total booth visits: Every employer, you or your exhibitors included, wants their booth to be showstopper of the virtual career fair. By tracking booth visits, hosts can assess the power of employer branding, and see which industries attracting most talent towards their available positions.

2) Total tab clicks:    The customized virtual booths are designed to be a hub for all information relevant to the exhibitor. Therefore, you should measure all visitor clicks at any booth to identify how helpful or inspiring the content was. 

3) Clicks per tab: Do not just track tab clicks at the surface level. Instead, measure each individual tab click on categories such as “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Careers”, “News”, “Photo Gallery”, and “Chat”.  Measure these independently to see which content outperforms others in comparison.

4) Total document downloads: If visitors look at your content, that’s great. But to really get down to the nitty-gritty, virtual career fairs allow hosts to measure total document downloads per booth. This acts as proof of the revolutionary, seamless, and eco-friendly information sharing features virtual events offer. 

5) Downloads per document: Not all content is created equal. If you select a platform that gives detailed insights regarding the volume of downloads per document for every exhibitor, you can easily identify what job seekers are looking for.

6) Total video views: Streamable videos attract great traction by audiences. Therefore, total video views per booth help determine the exact impact of the visuals.

7) Views per video: Similarly, views per video for every exhibitor’s booth highlight what made the best impression on your audience.

8) Chat volume: Virtual event booths are equipped with audio, video, and text-based chat capabilities. Therefore, conversations per booth or in the networking lounge help understand the extent of interactions. In addition, they measure the communication frequency between hiring managers and the logged-in talent.

Recruitment Event Auditorium Traffic Statistics

Last but not the last, you need to measure webinar traffic to evaluate how well your virtual career fair connected with your audience. Straightforward, yet crucial, your checklist of webinar statistics to measure should cover:

1) Total number of webinar attendees: An auditorium buzzing with activity is every host’s dream come true! If you track participation, you can help monitor the event’s success. This enables comparison with preset event goals such as brand awareness or job applications received.

2) Attendees per webinar: Measuring participation per webinar helps zoom in to the audience’s needs and interests, This will help you to prepare for future recruitment events with the right guests, topics of discussion and live Q&A sessions.

Conclusion

Measuring the performance of a traditional career fair is not just difficult, but also leaves open wide room for error. If you manually measure metrics like video views, brochure distribution, Q&A participation, it would be highly inefficient. It would not just require additional (and costly) staffing, but is tedious, especially during high traffic event hours.

If you choose a virtual career fair, it effectively addresses and resolves this pain point by making all activity on the platform precisely measurable in real-time. This makes the ROI a breeze to derive, and the post-event analysis makes it easy to determine the content that connected with the audience best. It also helps you determine the most powerful employer brands, and the performance of your pre-event marketing strategy.

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