5 Benefits of Hosting a Virtual Career Fair

Over the last year and a half, the corporate world has dramatically shifted towards remote work models. Teams who regularly met in an office were sent home and left to connect over Zoom or other conferencing platforms. Many companies and organizations were forced to reinvent their day-to-day by taking their business online to keep operations running virtually.

However, what started as an inconvenience actually brought new opportunities for recruiters and candidates alike.

While COVID-19 paved the way for virtual hiring, many recruiters have been using tools like virtual career fairs for years. These events grew in popularity in 2020; and now, hiring managers are looking to add them to their long-term recruiting arsenal.

In this post, we’ll share five ways virtual career fairs set recruiters, employers, and candidates up for success.

Reach a Larger Talent Pool

While in-person career fairs are often limited to candidates who live near your office, virtual events eliminate the obstacle of physical geography. They help you reach participants anywhere in the world with just the click of a button, making it easier to connect with ideal candidates, regardless of where they live.

Virtual career fairs are also more accessible and convenient for job seekers — which means you’re more likely to see higher participation rates and more hiring opportunities at these events compared to in-person ones.

Save on Venue and Event Costs

As an event planner, you’re often tasked with balancing various internal event requests against an ever-dwindling annual budget. Unfortunately, in-person events aren’t just more difficult to plan than virtual ones; they’re also significantly more expensive since you’ll need to cover expenses like:

- Venue rental
- Hospitality services
- Event staffing
- Event insurance
- Equipment rental

The list above is just a starting point, and the actual costs will vary depending on each unique event. As businesses look to bounce back from a slow year, it’s even more challenging to secure lofty budgets for hiring fairs and other upcoming events.

Virtual career fairs offer employers a much affordable way to reach job seekers and potential candidates. They require a virtual hosting environment but cut out costs for travel, in-person staffing, and many other traditional expenses.

What’s more, you can invest in a virtual environment and reuse it for multiple events, configuring content, setup, access, and more to fit your business needs and ensure your teams reach the right participants with the right message at the right time. The dynamic, reusable nature of virtual environments makes them all the more attractive to your stakeholders too.

Deliver Ongoing Value For Candidates

The primary value of your virtual hiring event lies in the connections attendees make. However, that's not the only thing you can offer them.

Consider bringing in consultants to provide career advice, resume workshops, or interview tips. This will do wonders for your brand and create immeasurable goodwill towards your organization and its products or services.

You can also support participants long after the live event ends, with on-demand access to the entire environment and associated content. This allows attendees to revisit an event later on, but it also opens the doors for registrants who weren’t able to attend the event in real-time.

For instance, give participants access to recorded sessions and panels, plus a list of contact information for sponsors and partners involved in your event. The easier it is for them to access and act on what they learned at the fair, the better chance you or your partners have at turning an introduction into a long-term career connection.

Track ROI and Performance Automatically

50% of marketers believe that audience engagement is the biggest contributor to virtual event success.[1] But how can you determine how well your virtual career fair impressed attendees or met pre-defined KPIs?

To effectively measure your event’s success, you need to track performance and reception at every stage:

- How many recipients interacted with your pre-event emails?
- What was the ratio of registrants to actual live attendees?
- Did participants download or view on-demand content post-event?
- How many new hiring opportunities did your career fair produce?

The right virtual events platform should include built-in tracking and reporting tools to help measure the success of your career fair before, during, and after the event, without additional effort or investment for your busy recruiting staff.

Stay Flexible in an Evolving Landscape

Flexibility is perhaps the most significant benefit of remote hiring. Virtual career fairs support candidates and recruiters with convenient access to one-on-one conversations, valuable industry content, and a diverse network of potential career connections.

Along with this new level of flexibility comes a shift in employer mindsets. If 2020 taught businesses anything, it’s to prepare for the unexpected. And while many people are returning to a new version of ‘normal’ post-pandemic, the dynamic nature of virtual connectivity will remain top-of-mind across industries.

Now is the perfect time to turn the lessons of 2020 into a virtual recruiting roadmap for the future. 6Connex can help you build custom virtual hiring events powered by our robust virtual environments and enablement features.

Are you ready to start planning your virtual career fair?

Download the eBook, How to Design a Virtual Job Fair Program, and get the details, tips, and planning strategies you need to design a successful virtual hiring event.