Hosting a virtual career fair has numerous benefits for recruiters, from providing a better candidate experience to speeding up the hiring process and building your talent pipeline. However, there are dozens of vendors on the market, so finding the right one to meet your needs can be a challenge. Fortunately, knowing what to look for in a virtual career fair platform will ensure you invest in the right partner — the first time.
#1: Easy-to-Use Virtual Career Fair Platform
Today’s recruiters are busier than ever. They’re responsible for managing the full recruiting process, working with hiring managers, building their employer brand, and developing a sourcing plan. And at the same time, they’re continuing to deal with The Great Resignation, an ongoing trend where employees are quitting their jobs due the COVID-19 pandemic. With everything they need to manage, recruiters lack the bandwidth to look at resumes for more than 7 seconds each.1
Recruiters don’t have time to learn complex recruitment technologies with a userface from the 1990s (just spend 5 minutes researching existing hiring event technologies to see examples). When looking for an easy-to-use virtual career fair platform, find a software option that’s intuitive and user friendly. With Live Recruit, for example, it takes less than less than 5 minutes to set up a virtual hiring event. As the Jackson 5 once said, “A-B-C, it’s easy as 1-2-3.”
#2: Transparent Pricing for Virtual Career Fairs
Being open about pricing isn’t a strong suit of the virtual career fair industry. The vast majority of hiring technology companies don’t show their pricing on their website; you need to go through a long demo process — two to three emails, a phone call, and a demo — before they’ll reveal how much it costs to work with them.
Look for a virtual career fair vendor that’s transparent about what they offer and how much it costs. This shows trustworthiness and integrity from the platform. Plus, you don’t want to make a buying decision in the dark or waste hours on a demo for a vendor that isn’t at the right price point for your needs.
Live Recruit is 100% transparent about costs, and our virtual career fair pricing is laid out on our website — plans start at just $349 a month ($295 monthly for an annual plan) with unlimited hiring events, by far the most affordable in the industry.
#3: An Experienced Virtual Career Fair Team
Ask yourself this: Would you trust a surgeon who self-taught themselves by watching videos on the internet? Of course not. You want the best in the field, someone with extensive training and experience.
Virtual career fairs are no different. You need a partner with considerable experience in recruitment and virtual event planning. The Live Recruit team, for example, has been running recruitment events for 19+ years with incredible success.
A vendor with experience will be able to problem-solve in real time and anticipate any issues before they happen. There’s a good chance they’ll have worked with hundreds of clients over the years and managed thousands of events, allowing them to perfect the event process. You’ll be able to trust that your virtual career fair will go smoothly. Finally, an experienced vendor will have the know-how to handle every aspect of your virtual hiring events, from event promotion to following up with candidates afterward.
#4: White-Glove Service for Virtual Career Fairs
When managing a virtual career fair, situations can arise where you’ll need your vendor’s support. That’s why it’s crucial to pick a vendor with white-glove service.
With Live Recruit, for example, you’ll get a dedicated account management team that’ll provide on-going support for requests, schedule check-ins, and offer best practices. On top of that, you’ll have access to our team of highly experienced content writers, designers, web developers, and digital marketing strategists.
#5: Highly Secure Virtual Career Fairs
There’s a reason cybersecurity is a $170 billion industry.2 Cyberattacks are becoming more and more common, with one study finding that computers get attacked 2,244 times a day.3
So, if you’re wondering how to choose a virtual career fair platform, put intensive security toward the top of your must-have list. Protecting your company and applicant data is essential to your reputation and business. What should you ask about? Make sure the virtual career fair platform has an in-house engineering team to handle security threats, DDoS mitigation protocols, automated vulnerability scanning, and third-party penetration testing.
#6: Advanced Reporting & Analytics for Virtual Career Fairs
Hosting a virtual career fair is only half the battle. You need a platform that offers the right tools to measure performance and optimize. That’s the best way to improve future events and hire faster.
Choose a platform that allows you to gain a big-picture view of your talent pipeline, determine which promotion channels drove the most attendees, and measure granular metrics, such as attendance rate, number of interviews, and chat analytics.
Finally, the platform should allow you to easily access event data. For example, make sure you can:
- Export data to Excel
- Push candidate data into your ATS
- Email candidate data to hiring managers and other recruiters
#7: Ability to Rate, Sort & Refer Candidates
There are dozens of virtual platforms that can help you host events, but you need one that’s built specifically to optimize the hiring process. Moving candidates through the hiring process should be quick and easy. Why? 39% of candidates will lose interest in a role if the process is too lengthy.4 Plus, the current hiring frenzy means candidates will likely get other offers while your company is deciding on next steps.
The software you choose should make it easy to:
- Refer candidates to a hiring manager or schedule a post-event interview — all within the platform
- Take notes on candidates, rate them, and share conversions so hiring managers have all the information they need before meeting with a candidate
- Sort candidates based on different criteria, such as location, experience, and occupation
#8: Excellent Candidate Experience for Virtual Career Fairs
Candidate experience refers to the various interactions a candidate has with your organization during the recruitment process. These interactions can include anything from the messaging on your website to company emails and conversations they have during a virtual career fair.
Choose a platform that provides the best possible experience for job seekers. For example, it should be easy for candidates to sign up for your event and upload their resume. They should also be able to join the event via text and get automated reminders over email, SMS, and their calendar.
#9: Virtual Career Fairs Built for Any Recruitment Team
Look for a virtual hiring event vendor that can handle the needs of any type of recruiter, including:
- Headhunters
- Corporate recruiters
- In-house talent acquisition professionals
- Contingency recruiters
- Outplacement recruiters
- Temporary staffing agency recruiters
You should, for example, be able to utilize the platform for filling short-term positions, hiring at multiple companies, or recruiting across industries.
#10: Robust Event Promotion for Virtual Career Fairs
A virtual career fair is only as good as the candidates who attend. But, like a party, job seekers won’t show up if they don’t know it’s happening.
An ideal virtual career fair partner will handle the event promotion so you can focus on what you do best — recruitment. Find a vendor with digital advertising expertise that will get the word out on the right channels, including search, job boards, social media, email, and others.
The Live Recruit team has 19+ years of experience driving candidates to events. We’ll handle every aspect of the process, including creative concepting, implementation, and optimization. Curious to learn more? Here’s how we helped a California-based organization engage 30K+ candidates and get over 500 RSVPs to a virtual hiring event.
Choosing the Right Virtual Career Fair Vendor
Finding success with your virtual career fairs will largely depend on the features, capabilities, and user-friendliness of the platform you work with. Fortunately, by utilizing the above list, you’ll know exactly what to ask as you meet with different vendors. The only thing left to do is start setting up demos with partners who can meet your needs.
References:
- O’Donnell, R. (2018, November 8). Eye tracking study shows recruiters look at resumes for 7 seconds. HR Dive.
- Forecast Analysis: Information Security, Worldwide, 2Q18 Update. (2018). Gartner.
- Hackers Attack Every 39 Seconds. (2020, May 24). 2017–02-10 | Security Magazine.
- Hollon, J. (2018, February 6). Bad Things Happen When Companies Take Too Long To Hire. Fistful of Talent.