Welcome to the era where social media not just helps you connect with your long-lost friends, but also helps you meet with your dream employers. Tools such as LinkedIn and Facebook have made it possible for jobseekers to deposit their resumes, share experiences, and reach out to professionals through easier and more effective means.
However, despite all the convenience offered by these online methods, it seems that offline recruitment strategy never loses its charm, including career fairs.
Typically crammed with recent grads, soon-to-be-graduated students, and even currently-employed individuals, career fair is still one of the best ways to engage with qualified pool of candidates, even when they are not actively looking for job. However, career exhibition and expo is not solely the must-visit for job seekers alone.
For recruiters, a career fair could be a crucial frontline to attract and fetch best talents in the business. As job seekers try to get ahead of their peers and secure a promising job offer, companies should stand out and ‘sell’ their business to entice top performers.
As your organisation prepares to promote or exhibit their service offerings at a career fair to reach out to fresh graduates, recruiters should know how to highlight the company’s advantages in the right way and draw people’s attention to the booth. Take a look at the following tips on how to make most of an upcoming career fair and attract talented individuals here:
1. Define your hiring needs clearly
Prior to the D-day of the career fair, you should clearly define your purpose of joining the career fair and assess the hiring needs. By knowing what and why the positions are needed for the organisation, you can focus on what types of candidates you need to pay attention. Therefore, when people hand you a resume, you can follow up with necessary planned actions accordingly.
2. Prepare the team for inquiries
Make sure that everyone who holds the responsibility at the career fair is aware of their role. The team of recruiters should be prepared with all the related information, such as business vision and goals, available job openings, the requirements, the procedures, etc.
3. Focus on the visuals
The appeal of your booth should be equally attractive to draw candidates and enquire primarily about your services, hiring needs, jobs on offer, about the company to get an overview of the workplace culture and job requirements. Do not underestimate the power of good visuals for your booth, to engage and bring in more visitors.
While the company’s booth should represent the organisation’s character and value, you should not neglect audience experience too. For example, you can use interactive media and video marketing to show how it looks like working for the company.
4. Reach out to visitors
Don’t just hide behind the booth! Rather than just sitting on your chair and being glued to answering emails or Smartphones, you should step in front of the stand and get closer to the visitors walking by. This will make it easier for you to start a conversation and tell them more about what your company has to offer.
5. Consider take-away items
Well, people love free
stuffs. Take-away items can be a great alternative to attract talents to your booth, as well as a good reminder of your organisation. Be it a sticker with your company’s logo or a pen with company’s name on it, this serves as a reminder marketing tool for talents to think of your brand and pass on referrals to their friends to apply for a job role.
Perhaps, you will need to arrange your budget to provide take-away items to appreciate enthusiasm of prospective talents who chose to drop by and find out more at the career fair.
6. Leverage on your social media reach
Social media is the fastest, easiest, and cheapest platform of communication to almost promote everything. Therefore, leverage the power of your company’s social media accounts to promote the event and let your followers know that you are hiring. For example, you can make use of the Facebook feature to create an event invitation, or Instagram Live to broadcast real-time events.
Talents might be able to acquire updated information about the latest job opening through online job portals and submit their applications via email. Nevertheless, nothing beats in-person communication.
Owing to this reason, even though technological advancements have made it possible for passive talent to find opportunities at their fingertips, there are many job opportunities and career choices that remain untapped, if you miss out on visiting the career fairs.
