Virtual Career Fairs & Other Online Recruiting Events

It’s rewarding listening to our customers then providing career fair technology and assorted solutions that solve real problems. Our purpose at Career Fair Plus (CF+) is to save event organizers time while improving outcomes for their job seekers.

Our eBook, Virtual Career Fairs & Recruiting Events, is your free portable guide to everything you always wanted to know about virtual recruiting programs but didn’t know whom to ask!

Make Virtual Recruiting Work For You

If you recruited employees or organized career fairs in 2020, you likely attended or hosted at least one virtual event. COVID-19 made virtual career fairs necessary; the open access, time savings, and cost-efficiency made them popular.

Today, event hosts are looking for easy, reliable solutions that are easy to produce and intuitive for attendees.

The five sections of this article introduce virtual career fairs, the pros and cons of these events, and steps to help you maximize the benefits for job seekers and hiring specialists.

• What is a virtual career fair?
• Who hosts what type of online recruiting events?
• Some pros and cons of virtual career fairs
• Why should I host a virtual recruiting event?
• How do I plan a virtual recruiting event?

What is a Virtual Career Fair?

A virtual career fair is an internet-based recruiting event hosted by a corporation, university, or organization to create employer-candidate connections online. These events are delivered on custom platforms accessed via websites or mobile apps. Program hosts, employers, and candidates benefit from various features depending on the technology.

The software also informs what other types of virtual recruiting events you can host besides career fairs. The more robust the platform, the wider the variety of online recruiting options you can offer your employers and job seekers.

Read our Top 3 Event Ideas for Virtual Recruiting before your next planning session!

Some Pros & Cons of Virtual Career Fairs

Virtual recruiting provides several advantages over in-person events because they are:

• Easier to organize: You don’t need to contract a space, arrange food service, or set up (then take down) tables and chairs.
• Budget-friendly: If you’re a recruiter, not traveling to a physical site saves money, whether it’s airfare and lodging or local mileage reimbursements. And event hosts don’t need to assign resources to receive and move employers’ advance booth shipments.

Virtual online recruiting also offers:

• Better crowd control: Welcome an unlimited number of attendees without risking long lines or exceeding building capacity.  
• Immediate and useful post-event feedback: Learn engagement levels, assess customer satisfaction and analyze deeper metrics to determine ROI.

And these programs also present some challenges. These potential hurdles are manageable, of course, especially if you know what to look for ahead of time:

• Technology: We could probably stop right there, and we’d all understand the possible issues. Relying on technology for your recruiting is the same risk as any other business activity dependent on the internet or a computer. Which means everything’s likely to work just fine.
• Forced separation: Candidates and employers aren’t in the same room. However, virtual fairs are more personal if an on-site program requires social distancing and prohibits handshaking.
• Learning curves: There’s a one-time learning curve with a new platform. However, if you choose the right partner, they’ll support hosts, candidates, and employer teams before, during, and after the event.

Read more in Recruiters, answer these 5 questions to win at virtual career fairs!

Why should I host a virtual recruiting event?

Offering an online recruiting program converts your team’s hosting efforts into practical benefits for employers and candidates that:

• Accelerate time to hire
• Eliminate event day scheduling surprises
• Expand the talent pool with higher participation levels
• Facilitate purposeful conversations with well-informed candidates
• Organize candidate profiles
• Personalize interactions
• Showcase employer branding

To maximize these benefits, choose a robust hosting platform with features such as:

Read more in Virtual vs. In-person Career Fairs: 4 Reasons to Choose Virtual

How do I plan a virtual recruiting event?

Trust your experience.

You’ve done this before (even if you’re new to virtual recruiting).

Everything you need to know about hosting a virtual career fair you already learned planning on-site events. It’s a similar process made easier with time-saving automation, customizable schedules, multiple meeting formats, and a bunch of easy-going, happy people at CF+ ready to help!

Read more in 6 Important Steps to Ensure Your Virtual Career Fair Runs Smoothly

Why are Career Fair Plus Customers Thrilled with the CF+ Platform & People?

Because our software is easy to use and we work as hard as our customers do to deliver a productive, rewarding virtual career fair.

Read more in COVID-19 Introduced Me to Virtual Career Fairs, and Now I Never Want to Go Back

As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” And in this case, COVID is the necessity that forced career event hosts to innovate from on-site programs to online recruiting. So, if you're looking to increase your format options, choose a hosting partner whose technology platform offers more than chat queues or virtual profiles.

You know CF+ supports your virtual events. We also help you host socially distant, on-site recruiting events, including in-person career fairs with proprietary crowd management tools and 1:1 scheduling.

And CF+ does hybrid recruiting events when you’re ready to bring back in-person recruiting and keep your virtual programs moving forward.

Career Fair+ is uniquely positioned to help you build in-person, virtual, and hybrid career fairs. Schedule a call with one of our super-friendly problem solvers who can explain it all. (That’s a thank you rhyme for reading this whole blog!)