Virtual career days and online job fairs have emerged as the most efficient and effective ways for employers to recruit. Mainly because job seekers who attend do not only learn more about your company, but they also have an opportunity to meet your hiring managers and interact during the event.
Scheduling a weekly Virtual Career Day is a great way for your company to open your doors and meet qualified candidates without the limitations of an in-person event. It also gives you more flexibility, since you don’t have to schedule it around a job fair or hiring event. By offering this access, both employed and unemployed job seekers have an opportunity to learn more about your company and meet your hiring managers.
A great strategy is to promote a weekly Virtual Career Day at a set time, say every Wednesday from 12-2 PM. This is a great time since many people can log in during their lunch hour if they are currently employed but looking for a better opportunity.
One big difference to physical career fairs is the advantage of reaching the highly coveted, employed job seekers. These people are usually highly qualified experts still employed at another company but open for attractive job offers. They do not attend physical career fairs but will participate virtually or online to gather information through more anonymous ways.
The biggest advantage is being able to view the candidate’s resume, enter a live chat, and if your hiring manager feels there’s a good fit, move right into a pre-screening video interview. Also, students and young professionals strongly prefer online channels to find a job.
To date, our platform has been leveraged mostly to host career fairs and hiring events with multiple employers. That remains a great option for many employers who gain to benefit from the exposure. However, those job seekers are also meeting with your potential competitors and applying for the same jobs at other companies.
By promoting a link to your Virtual Career Day along with your job listings on whatever job board you post them, you’ll be attracting talent directly to your organization for an opportunity to pre-screen them one-on-one. Let’s face it, anyone can look good, or bad on a resume, and many times a recruiter or hiring manager may never see the resume of someone who could have been a good fit.
Virtual Career Days offer that unique opportunity to chat and meet the candidate, if even for a few brief minutes to see if there is a fit and move forward in the application process. Hiring managers love the ability to choose who they want to enter a video interview with, and can often find a diamond in the rough, that could have been easily overlooked by basing a decision solely on a resume.
Jayson Waller, the CEO of SolarHOME has hired over 700 employees during the pandemic. In a recent podcast interview, he mentioned a few pointers that have helped make their recruiting efforts so successful.
One is to hire based on character and ambition more than on skills and experience. Save for a few positions like accounting and recruiting, the company is much more willing to hire a person that has the right attitude and desire to learn, than to hire an experienced installer, that has high demands and may come with bad habits from previous employers.
By offering a weekly Virtual Career Day, less qualified job seekers know they can meet with the hiring manager and ask questions that reduce the intimidation of sending an ‘unqualified’ resume for a job opening. And as we already mentioned, the highly qualified job seeker is much more apt to attend virtually and initiate the job application process as well.
See how you can add a Virtual Career Day option to your job listings and make it easy for candidates to meet your recruiters without either person having to leave their desk.