10 Best Practices to Host a Successful Virtual Career Fair

Whether you’re a company hosting a virtual career fair to hire top talent, regardless of its geography, or you’re a university that wishes to conduct campus recruitment to enhance the candidate-employer experience, the good news is that you’ve come to the right place.

This article is an amalgamation of expert advice and best practices that will help you dominate your next virtual career fair.

10 Best Practices to Host a Successful Virtual Career Fair

1. Scale-Up Employer Branding to Attract Top Talent

Just as candidates need to impress employers to land great jobs, employers need to impress great candidates to fill up their positions.

Therefore, it is essential for you to showcase your work culture, brand identity, and growth opportunities that you offer as a reason to compel top talent.

Moreover, try to make yourself reachable. Make it easy for visitors to research your company by providing informative brochures, introductory videos, live Q&A sessions, webinars and other resource formats that comprehensively deliver your employer brand.

2. Facilitate Interactions via Live Chat and Networking Options

The purpose of using a virtual career fair platform or a virtual job fair is to connect job seekers and employers, allowing them to assess each other. Make use of audio, video and text-based chat capabilities to enable talent to easily reach out to employer representatives and vice versa. This primarily helps in on-the-spot screening.

In addition, you can set up a networking lounge to allow job seekers to intermingle and make valuable connections within a chat room.

3. Host Dynamic Webinars

Webinars are globally proven tools to engage the masses. Set up a series of webinars with live, as well as on-demand content. This allows for two-way communication and real-time feedback using polls, surveys and quizzes.

Pro tip: To make sure you get the desired coverage, invite experts and top industry professionals to share helpful advice and maximize the event attendance.

4. Offer Swag Bags

Opt for a greener hiring strategy and go paperless. On the other hand, allow candidates to download resources and access them, either in real-time, or a later time.

5. Use Candidate Search Filters to Fast-Track Effective Hiring

What separates a virtual career fair from a traditional career fair is the ability to cut down on the hassle of going through thousands of resumes to find the right one.

Using search filters, employer representatives can look for relevant skills and qualifications to shortlist a set of candidates and minimize the time spent on this process. Essentially, this helps in cutting through the crowd and getting right onto what employers are looking for.

6. Add a real-time Job Board Within The Virtual Career Fair

Making it effortless to search for jobs based on industry, job type, or company name, the job board makes it easy for talent to submit resumes. Meanwhile, you, as an organizer can enjoy the benefit of having real-time insights pertaining to metrics such as most viewed jobs and applicant count

7. Ensure Your Process is Simple

Job seekers, especially passive job seekers won’t spend much time filling out forms. To make sure that they stick around and submit their job applications, make sure that you provide quick links and short application formats to get the job done.

8. Set Up a WCAG Accessibility Compliant Event

To make the Virtual Career Fair exceptionally intuitive and meaningful, it should ideally be set up in compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG ) offering the following:

• special color contrasts
• text character flexibility
• page narrations
• captioned webinars, etc

Learn more about vFairs’ accessibility features here.

9. Use an Omnichannel Approach to Promote Your Event

Promotional efforts contribute the most into the success of your event. Use digital avenues such as social media, your website’s career page, press releases, emails, and so on, to attract your target audience and maximize event attendance.

10. Have a Fool-Proof Post-Event Follow Up Mechanism

Although it sounds too simple to mention, this practice often ends up being overlooked. Sending post-event ‘thank you’ emails and event feedback surveys can have a leave an enormously positive impression on your audience, especially on the younger lot.

You should also consider leaving your Virtual Career Fair open for access for a few weeks after it has been wrapped up. This will keep your content evergreen and will keep bringing in prospects who could not make it to the live event.

Click here to read The Organizer’s Playbook to Hosting Amazing Virtual Events.

Final Word

While setting up a virtual career fair might be a fairly new experience for you, it is one that has greatly benefited huge organizations such as Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) and many more. With a striking employer experience, satisfied candidates, and high rates of applications, there is no doubt that these organizations have captured one of the most successful ROIs for their Virtual Career Fairs.

Read More: The Ultimate Guide to a Virtual Career Fair