While researching my latest podcast on virtual job fair vendors I hit up Joe Matar, the VP of Marketing for Brazen, one of the leading companies that hold them. Here’s how he says you should prepare your online career event for success.
How should companies prepare for holding one?
You must have a plan of attack when you enter into a virtual career fair which requires preparation. Recruiters should document all the questions they plan to ask candidates during the virtual event. We also recommend that you write out responses to commonly asked questions. In Brazen’s platform, you can actually save common questions and answers and easily insert them into your conversations at the appropriate times to save you time (and also to stay consistent with your answers!).
Get comfortable with the technology before the live event. While virtual career fair technology is fairly straightforward and simple to use, we highly recommend using the technology in a sandbox environment before entering into a live event. This way, you’ll know how to quickly toggle between multiple chats, pull up a candidate’s resume, insert your prepared answers, and follow up with candidates after the event.
Build out your virtual booths before the event and use the virtual “space” to highlight your people and culture and enhance your employer brand. Virtual career fairs are a great place to show off your company. In addition to chatting with recruiters about open positions, candidates will also have an opportunity to watch videos, read articles, and engage with your brand as long as you’ve added this content prior to the event. For example, in Brazen’s platform, recruiters can upload culture videos, employee testimonial videos, welcome videos from your CEO or hiring managers, and share links to articles about benefits, values, and culture. All of this content goes a long way in creating an immersive candidate experience and separating you from the competition.
Staff appropriately: we recommend a ratio of one recruiter for every ten registrants to ensure your team is able to connect with all interested candidates. The last thing you want to do is invite a candidate to chat with you in a virtual event and then not have anyone available to chat. I don’t think I have to mention it but this is a bad candidate experience.
Have a follow up strategy. Have a well-defined follow up process for what to do with candidates after you get done chatting. Platforms like Brazen can reduce the lift on follow up by allowing your team to rate candidates, leave notes, and send candidates directly to hiring managers or schedule phone and in person interviews right from the platform but all recruiters need to understand the requirements and qualifications for moving candidates to the next steps.
More Best Practices
Your virtual hiring events should be targeted at certain groups of candidates. For example, Brazen clients will host events that are specific to one job category like nurses or events targeted at veterans. We even have clients that have worked with HBCUs to host virtual events with their students. Segmenting and targeting specific audiences will help get attention and increase your chances of finding the right candidates. This also means that bigger isn’t always better.
Send reminder emails to those candidates that have signed up for your events to increase the chances that they attend. Even though we are seeing attendance rates as high as 90% during these current times, it is still important to remind candidates that they have an upcoming virtual event with links on how to connect as well as best practices on how to prepare.
Use video: Video was important before COVID-19 but just became even more important as we all moved to remote work spaces and lost much of that in person interaction. You should use recorded video clips to welcome candidates to your events, you should insert on-demand videos into your events that candidates can view while they aren’t chatting, and you should augment your text-based chats with live broadcasts hosted by hiring managers (this is a feature that Brazen recently launched and it is spreading like fire).
How much lead time is good for promotion?
Promotion of your event is one of the most critical pre-event preparations. I always say, just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come. We recommend starting that promotion 7-10 days prior to the event. Unlike in person career fairs, which usually require promotion of the event weeks if not a month out, virtual career fairs are more convenient and accessible to most job seekers and therefore don’t require extensive planning (like traveling, missing work, etc.).
Also, when it comes to promotion, you can use many of the same channels you use to market other events. But as a refresher, we see our top clients marketing their virtual career fairs via social media, through email, and on their career sites.
If you are using Brazen you can even send your upcoming virtual events to your chatbot that lives on your career site or on your job reqs so that what candidates are on your site chatting with the Brazen chatbot, the chatbot can recommend attending the virtual hiring event and get the candidates signed up right there!
I was also moderating a panel discussion just today and some of the panelists are even marketing their virtual hiring events via postcards and radio ads. Traditional media can still work! But I would recommend a mix of digital and traditional for best results.