With so much of the recruiting and hiring process moving online, do career fairs still make sense? If they do, how can businesses make the most of job fairs and use them to connect with qualified job-seekers? Keep reading to learn more about the value of career fairs in the changing hiring landscape and what companies can do to get the most out of them.
Where Do Career Fairs fit in Your Strategy?
There is no doubt that job fairs will continue to play an important role in recruiting. However, some changes that companies made during the pandemic will continue to have an impact.
Specifically, employers will continue to embrace virtual career fairs while also returning to in-person events. This change is a reflection of a move towards an overall hybrid recruiting approach.
What Is a Career Fair?
A career or job fair is an event designed to introduce candidates to a variety of employers. One career fair may look very different from another. That’s because these events are often specialized.
For example, a job fair may target a specific demographic of job-seekers, such as recent college graduates. Another may focus specifically on a particular industry. Career fairs may be held by:
- Colleges and universities
- Employment agencies
- Staffing companies
- Industry organizations
- Public service agencies
- Large employers
While they are no longer as popular as they once were, businesses can benefit by adding career fairs to their recruiting toolkit. The benefits of career fair recruiting include:
- Saving on recruiting outreach costs by having many candidates come to you.
- Getting a feel for the talent in a particular area or industry.
- Sharing your employer value proposition with candidates who haven’t connected with your company
- Benefiting from organizational work done by someone else
- Reaching out to a younger demographic
Job fairs, especially those held by universities and public organizations, are often created with diversity in mind. That means the event organizers reach out to a diverse audience when marketing the event. That can benefit your own DE&I (diversity equity and inclusion) efforts.
Virtual Career Fairs Best Practices
Businesses that weren’t using virtual career fairs before the pandemic are most likely using them now. Ideally, they’ve found a cost-saving way to cast a wide net and reach many candidates.
Because of this, virtual job fairs can serve as an excellent way to engage in top-of-funnel recruiting, pre-screen candidates, and generate interest among job-seekers who are taking a “kicking the tires” approach to their job search.
Just make sure to provide an easy path for interested prospects to move into your virtual candidate experience.
A Strategic Approach to In-Person Job Fairs
As you might imagine, in-person events have more overhead. You have to transport equipment, staff your recruiting booth, print materials, and dedicate several hours to greeting candidates. While all of this effort and cost can be worthwhile, it’s important to ensure that you get the best return on your investment.
One way to do this is to take a bit of a hybrid approach. Take advantage of the fact that many career fair organizers will allow you to share information about your company on their event website. Use this to provide information about your company, necessary qualifications, and even links to pre-screening assessments.
By doing this, you can help ensure that candidates approaching your booth are more likely to be pre-qualified.
What to Bring to a Job Fair
There’s a significant amount of advice for candidates attending career fairs, but it’s equally as important for employers to be prepared as well. The pressure is on hiring teams to go all out to communicate their work culture, opportunities for growth, and perks.
What should you bring? To some extent, that depends on whether the job fair is virtual or in-person. However, there are items you will bring to both.
Start with the Right Team
Whether you are staffing an event in person or online, you need the right team. This group will always include sufficient recruiters to help screen applicants and share information about your company.
However, it can also be beneficial to bring along other team members. For example, if you are recruiting for a specific department, you could bring along someone from that department. You can also add real impact to your recruiting messaging by bringing along someone from your leadership team.
Prepare Screening and Assessment Questions
If you prepare screening and assessment questions ahead of time, you will find that things go much more smoothly during the event. Also, by offering the same questions to each candidate who approaches, you help to ensure that you aren’t allowing implicit bias to impact the recruiting process.
Don’t Forget Printed and Digital Materials
It’s important to have plenty of information sources and other materials for your target audience. These will allow you to share information about the available jobs, your company culture, and your recruiting process. Some of the materials that you might consider bringing along or making available for download include:
- Applications for employment
- Business cards
- Directions to your location for interviewing
- Company literature
- Product samples or videos
You can consolidate much information about your company, culture, and employer value proposition by offering a customized jobseeker report. This report is a document that you can customize with information about your company’s mission, diversity efforts, employee feedback, culture scores, and pictures.
The report can be a handy give-away that you can send off with prospects to keep your business front of mind as they wander the fair investigating other opportunities.
