It’s quite expected that recruiting agencies and higher education institutions – such as universities, colleges and professional schools – are looking for an appropriate post-pandemic recruitment strategy for hiring and recruiting success going forward. Some strive to showcase the brand and culture of companies in front of top talent, while others are more focused on streamline contact sharing between companies seeking for talent and the right candidates. One thing is certain – they’ll all need technology as an ally to scale and succeed.
Choosing the best approach for your job fair
After understanding how virtual and hybrid job fairs can speed recruitment, it’s time to think about which approach better fits your goals. Although you’ll have to consider different inner factors, such as your job fair size and timeline, your budget and attendee geography, it’s also important to know the nuances and pitfalls of each available scenario.
So, let’s cut to the chase:
- In-person job fairs are still considered the most effective way of communication and are perceived as more credible and positive when it comes to connecting employers with qualified job candidates. As you can imagine, it’s easier to relay complex information about open positions face-to-face.
- Virtual job fairs are also still very attractive, since they benefit from a faster turnaround time, reduced costs and a broader reach. If you can hire great applicants from the other side of the world behind a screen, why not do it? Get to know the 4 essential steps to host a perfect virtual job fair.
- Finally, hybrid career fairs can give you the flexibility to reach the greatest number of qualified candidates, but rely heavily on technological resources. Most are the same as for virtual events, but will probably include hardware and software for capturing, producing, and live streaming your job fair, while allowing you to combine in-person and remote speakers. Learn more about our production services for digital events.
Benefits and challenges of a virtual or hybrid job fair
We’ve already given our readers an overview of the main challenges and benefits of organizing a virtual career fair, and introduced some key tools to create a memorable virtual or hybrid event as well. In this article, we’ll focus on the following talking points:
- Required technology – A key challenge when organizing a virtual or hybrid job fair is choosing the right event technology. Selecting a reliable partner and platform is just as important as the venue itself. The virtual event platform you choose should let candidates actively participate in different sessions by creating personalized agendas, engaging with recruiters’ content, clear doubts, meeting and networking with other peers, and interacting with companies. Remember – technology should act as a facilitator between job seekers and employers, but also as a bridge between your virtual and in-person audience.
- CV capture & document sharing – If digitizing interactions was already a groundbreaking idea and an aspiration-focus to boost innovation before the pandemic, it’s now a primary requirement to operate live events in a safe environment. With the beamian solution for job & career fairs, you’ll be able to simplify contact and data sharing – such as resumes, brochures and other files – between employers and candidates with a simple push of a button for virtual settings, and through a simple smart badge swipe for in-person scenarios.
- Benefits for job seekers – With beamian, candidates can previously register online for your job fair event, submit their data and upload their CVs and LinkedIn profiles. Once attending the job fair, they’ll be able to apply for open positions or just leave their resumes in a hassle-free way. Later, they’ll receive the information and contacts of the companies to which they’ve decided to apply.
- Benefits for employers – One of the most relevant added values of the beamian hybrid & virtual career fair platform is that employers can access all the applications in real time, take notes on their preferred candidates and mark their favorites. And of course, set up individual or group video-call interviews with them. Afterwards, companies can leverage the usability of the digitized data to create metrics and reports, in an organized way.
Are you an university employability officer? Take a look at this ultimate checklist of virtual career fairs for universities.
Why are virtual and hybrid job fairs the future?
The face of recruiting has changed almost overnight. It changed not only in workforce expectations, needs and opportunities, but also the way employers moved themselves to approach candidates in order to attract and retain the talent they need to grow and support their businesses hereafter. The truth is that virtual and hybrid job fairs are here to save companies’ money sending out multiple recruiters to dance around tight booths with free pens, and use affordable video interview technology instead, to create less chaotic, more efficient recruiting events.
We’re far from watching the end of traditional job fairs, but the benefits of enjoying a virtual component, singly or combined, are beyond doubt – quicker hiring processes, flexibility in scheduling, diversity on talent acquisition, brand expansion, reduction in formality and much more that goes without saying.
