The sun is slowly coming out of hibernation, snow is clearing out, green leaves are freshening up our days, birds are happily chirping again, summer is surely nearing. While most of you are secretly craving for a beach holiday, you should not miss out the huge talent pool that is awaiting in the universities across the country. Yes, we are talking about the job fairs, where you will be welcomed to a large pool of untapped talent, curiously swarming in with questions. How prepared are you?
Career fairs are events of opportunities; for the job seekers and employers. An obvious reason being, your concerns of diversity can be easily addressed through such fairs. Job fairs can bring extraordinary talents to your company who can provide fresh perspectives. An unapparent reason will be the potential these job fairs provide to accelerate your employer branding. Let us see in detail how you can suit up for a successful campus recruitment.
Know Your Audience
It’s an easy guess. Millennials!
Millennials are not uninformed people. Know that they have already looked up your company on social media before they turn up at your booth. They are thirsty for more information about your company that’s not available on the web. How do you impress a tech-savvy millennial? With tech, duh. For example, you can amaze the students with a VR simulation of your office interiors. Or a slideshow of your office interiors, team outings, brainstorming moments etc can be played in your booth on a screen.
Another way to conquer the hearts of your guests at job fair is to go live on social media. Surely, you can get someone in your team to tweet about the happenings at job fair. Snapchat or Instagram stories at the job fair, perhaps interacting with the job seekers can hook their hearts. When they find your organization resonating their lifestyle, they would badly want to work with you.
Remember to forsake hierarchy and welcome amiability. You are going to be amidst a group of young people, who are fresh to the job world. They will be already intimidated by the prospect of job as such. Make your booth seem friendly. Don’t let a table come between you and the job seeker as a boundary establishing hierarchy. Instead, stand with him/her to discuss the job, the benefits of joining your company, career growth etc.
Make the conversation about them. Everything that they want to know to join your company.
Job fairs are a direct battleground for talent. Your competitive advantage will get you the best talent. From your team’s approach to the last step of hiring the graduate, the competition will remain stiff.
Sell Your Brand
That being said, never miss out your company in your conversations. Consider job fairs as an economical but powerful site for advertising your company. From setting up your brand till the moment of hiring the student, employer branding stays important. If you are not careful at each point, it will negatively impact the brand. From the tone of conversations to a delayed interview process, there are various traps that you may fall into.
Having a proper employer branding in place can help you get noticed by students easily. Place your booth in a strategic location (and not in a corner) so that you are easily accessible. Design your booth in accordance with your brand outlook. Make sure that you are stocked with a lot of brochures and goodies that the students can take back.
Take a decision whether to collect resumes on site and give a call later or direct them to apply online. In this fast moving world, where decisions cannot be kept for later, you can equip your booth with laptop and wi-fi to have the students apply online, on the spot.
Although, job fairs are usually networking events, some companies choose to hold interviews on the spot to take away an exceptional student. Sometimes, the student that you had eyed, would be already hired by the time you decide to give them a call. So, prepare your team to hold the interview just in case someone comes by.
Everything that happens at the booth will be noted by the student. Explore this opportunity to communicate your employer brand to them. Connecting with them matters, whether you end up hiring them or not. A year later, when you turn up again at the university, the good name and the bad name will prevail. Good name works in your advantage.
If you haven’t started with employer branding yet, here’s the guide.
Bag them before it’s too late
Millennials are not going to wait endlessly for your call. And job fair is not their only avenue of exploration. Soon after the job fair, they would move to sites like LinkedIn to apply for more jobs. You are dealing with a new generation of people who keep Plans B to Z ready, in case A does not work out.
Speeding up the process on your end is the sure way to get the talents into your organization, and believe us, you can do it!
A job fair will invite a lot of resumes and physically going through each of them can be a tiring process. Thankfully, you have let them apply on the spot through your ATS. Most of the ATS have inbuilt resume screening options. Like Ideal, which automates resume screening is integrated to the ATS Greenhouse. You can check if your ATS helps you to do so. If not, you can rush to upgrade your ATS.
The next step after resume shortlisting is scheduling interviews. Research suggests that, scheduling interviews alone consumes about 20+ hours each hours from a recruiter’s work hours. You can fast forward this step with an automated scheduling system, like My Ally’s AI powered virtual assistant, Alex. Alex will schedule interviews with the candidate on your behalf and can also respond to queries from candidate’s side. This will reduce time candidate spends in pipeline, thereby increasing your hiring efficiency. On time responses to candidate’s queries will boost your employer branding as well.
Importantly, it is essential to give feedback to the participants after the interview even if they don’t make it to hire. They are young graduates, trotting into the adult world with high hopes. A plain rejection can demotivate them, while a rejection with feedback can help them improve; also spikes up how they perceive your brand!
Job fairs are like a rite of passage from the graduate’s point of view. It is in your hands to make it worth attending. Let this summer bring fresh millennial folks to your company!
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