3 Ways To Improve the Impact of Your Career Fair

Attracting the best talent in large events is no easy task, these tips will help you stand out from the rest

Organizing a career fair still holds relevancy as one of the most effective PR and branding initiative your organization can pursue. It’s a connecting bridge between employers and potential candidates and it gives you the opportunity to understand your talent pool via human to human interaction.

Instead of recruiters wading through a stack of resumes that can’t communicate other soft skills and competencies, a career fair allows you to meet talent head on and discover hidden attributes of candidates with great career potential for your organization.

An effective career fair strategy can shorten your hiring process and get great candidates straight through your door. Some employers even make job offers right then and there; when they find the right fit, without extending the hiring process back to their site.

So let’s get to how you can increase footfall and a qualified attendance of candidates to your career fair.

1. Have a targeted marketing campaign designed to attract qualified candidates for your job postings.

First off — before you get to the mechanics of creating your recruitment marketing campaign, define your recruitment/ hiring goal(s). For example — if you are looking to hire software developers, host an industry specific job fair (tech) focused on the developers’ community. And if its volume hiring for entry level positions like customer service/ support, you can march on with a campus hiring activity by partnering with student associations/ career centres of credible universities. In cases where you have a lot of open vacancies, you might want to run your own corporate job fair.

That said, here are some methods via which you can pre-register and increase attendance for your career fair based on your hiring requirements:

• Messenger bots. At a career fair, to encourage patronage in future, organizers invite high-quality employers to sponsor the event and in exchange get exposure to a larger number of job seekers, exhibitors, and people attending the event in general. These sponsors are promoted by eye-catching banners/ sponsored content to display at the event, beginning at the registration table. This way, prospective candidates can scan the QR code enshrined on your logo and start a conversation with the bot to get more information about your organization. This is when they can walk up to your stall/ booth and learn more about the career prospects and hiring requirements with your employer brand. On the other hand, when candidates visit your career page or your Facebook page, they can start the interaction with the embedded messenger bot which can retarget them to your career fair landing page to register for the event.

• Landing pages. Using targeted keywords and demographics for your Fb ads or job advert(s), you can target a specific audience for your career fair. When candidates click on these ads, they can be redirected to a landing page that has an easy-to-fill form for them to pre/ register for the job fair. For an effective registration, these landing pages can be designed with the overall career theme, message, hiring process and the job requirements.
• SMS. In a candidate-driven market, SMS works in faster speed than most of other communication channels. Especially when you integrate SMS with your CRM, you can reach out to multiple candidates and inform them about the Career Fair and its details through a link. Through this link, they can be redirected to a simple form to register themselves. Further, using a mobile platform can enhance your [employer] brand image as candidates love to experience new, real-time, on-the-go ways to communicate with employers when they are considering various employment options.

2. Stand out in the Career Fair.

At a large career fair, you would be competing with other employer brands to get the attention of your prospective candidates/attendees. So it’s always better to stand out in the career fair with some of the below essentials.

• Bring giveaways. Entice attendees to stop-by via offering some freemium stuff — things like T-shirts, keychains, mugs, folders, diaries, calendars, etc., and free snacks as well! These giveaways keep up the interest in attendees to learn more about career prospects with your company. This may also create some buzz around your booth to attract more attendees.
• Show promptness by seeking candidate details/ information. Capturing candidate information like name, phone numbers, and emails can help you nurture these candidates even if you don’t have a job opening for them currently. This is where we can help you store and monitor the inflow of candidates via our CRM. With this information, you can call/ SMS/ WhatsApp these candidates and move them further into the hiring process. In a fast-paced career fair, when you establish a process for a post-career fair follow-up, [more] attendees will appreciate the promptness with which you attempt/ promise to keep in touch with them.

• Host a special event. Go a step further than just setting up a high-tech booth to interact with prospective candidates. You can speak to the career fair organizers to host your own ‘lunch and learn’ workshop/ seminar to tell your brand’s story and mission in a unique way. This can help you build that initial connection with attendees.
• Showcase your employer branding resources. Your recruitment/ hiring team can use recruitment/corporate video or a slideshow on a screen, which attendees can stop by and watch/ listen in. Further, corporate recruitment brochure can work wonders when it is refreshingly well-written and visually appealing. Communicating information such as company history, team members, culture, and some employee testimonials via strong visual display(s) can help you draw more attendees to your booth/ stall. Interestingly, you can equip your phone booth with iPads for attendees to complete their first round of interview via chatting with bots for the said positions. Below is one noticeable view of how employers use our recruitment technology solution to screen large volumes of candidates in such events.

• Do something different. At a career-focused event, differentiating yourself is very important to attract the candidates you’re looking for. A great example is what one of our clients, Sykes, a leading BPO and customer experience company, did at its career fair to invite more attendees to apply for its job positions. Normally, at a job fair, there is budget designated for goodies or branded merchandise, what Sykes did is that they selected 3 institutions and the budget was given to them. But what percent went to what institutions was decided by the candidates by selecting an institution after the application — which is titled, ‘You apply, we donate.’ Here’s what it looks like:

3. Create the right team to conduct interviews/ pre-screening via leveraging technology.

It can be a bit daunting to monitor the inflow of candidates via multiple sourcing channels. But staffing your booth with appropriate hiring managers and giving them access to talent acquisition technology can empower them to conduct personalized/ mini-interviews with candidates, seamlessly. For attending to potential high-quality candidates, you should bring your decision makers, who can make on the spot/ immediate hiring decisions. Additionally, ensure that your booth space/ stall is in high-traffic area — and is noticeable, say with banner stands, table-top displays, etc. — so that your team can interact with more attendees/ visitors.

How are you maximizing your career fair opportunity for attracting the best talent?

We’d love to hear new ways to get more mileage from each event. Let us know in the comments!

Talkpush is the new way employers and candidates connect all over the world. We believe hiring is about starting conversations; and are on a mission to level up the recruitment experience.

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