Benefits of a Virtual Hiring Event Platform

The Covid pandemic forced employers to pivot to virtual to be able to hire and avoid the face-to-face disruption. This taught employers, recruiters and staffing companies valuable lessons and new hiring strategies that remain in place today.

Essentially, virtual proved that it has many advantages over in-person only events. It’s not to say that virtual needs to replace in person hiring events, but adding virtual, and turning in-person events into hybrid events will yield better results. Below are just a few of the main reason you want to make sure you integrate virtual into your hiring strategy.

A virtual hiring event platform offers several benefits compared to traditional in-person hiring events. Here are some of the advantages:

  1. Wider reach: Virtual hiring events allow companies to reach a larger and more diverse pool of candidates. Geographical limitations are eliminated, enabling participation from candidates regardless of their location. This expands the talent pool and increases the chances of finding the right fit for the job.
  2. Time and cost savings: Hosting virtual events eliminates the need for renting physical venues, travel expenses, and other logistical costs associated with in-person events. Recruiters and candidates can attend from their respective locations, saving time and reducing overall costs.
  3. Convenience and accessibility: Virtual hiring events provide convenience to both recruiters and candidates. Recruiters can easily schedule and manage multiple interviews and interactions from a central platform. Candidates can participate from the comfort of their homes or offices, reducing the stress and expenses associated with travel and accommodation.
  4. Enhanced efficiency and productivity: Virtual platforms streamline the hiring process by providing features like automated interview scheduling, candidate screening, and digital resume management. Recruiters can efficiently manage large volumes of applicants, conduct back-to-back interviews, and easily collaborate with their team members. This leads to improved productivity and faster hiring decisions.
  5. Increased engagement and interactivity: Virtual platforms offer various tools and features to enhance engagement during hiring events. These can include live chat, video interviews, interactive presentations, and virtual networking rooms. These interactive elements facilitate better communication between recruiters and candidates, allowing for a more immersive and personalized experience.
  6. Data-driven insights: Virtual hiring event platforms often provide analytics and data tracking capabilities. Recruiters can gather valuable data on candidate engagement, interview performance, and event success metrics. These insights enable recruiters to make data-driven decisions, optimize their hiring processes, and improve future events.
  7. Environmental sustainability: By eliminating the need for physical travel and reducing paper usage, virtual hiring events contribute to a more environmentally friendly approach. This aligns with sustainability goals and demonstrates a company’s commitment to reducing its carbon footprint.

Overall, virtual hiring event platforms offer numerous benefits, including broader candidate reach, cost savings, convenience, efficiency, enhanced engagement, data-driven insights, and environmental sustainability. These advantages make them an attractive option for companies looking to streamline their hiring processes and find top talent.

After powering over 7,000 virtual job fairs, Premier Virtual has become on of the top rated, and most reliable platforms in the industry. But there still are employers and recruiters who have not adapted, and not embraced this format. For those that remain on the fence, let’s also review what a virtual job fair is and why it can accomplish everything you can do in an in-person event.

What is a virtual job fair?

A virtual job fair, also known as an online job fair or virtual career fair, is an event that connects job seekers with employers in a virtual environment. It is a digital adaptation of traditional job fairs where employers set up booths or stalls to showcase their company and available job opportunities, and job seekers attend in person to meet and interact with recruiters.

In a virtual job fair, the entire event takes place online through a dedicated platform or software. Job seekers can log in to the virtual fair from anywhere using their computer or mobile device, while employers can participate remotely from their offices. The platform typically includes features such as chat rooms, video conferencing, and information booths to facilitate communication and engagement.

Here’s how a virtual job fair typically works:

  1. Registration: Job seekers register for the virtual job fair by providing their details, including their resume, job preferences, and contact information.
  2. Virtual Booths: Participating employers set up virtual booths that represent their company. These booths can include company information, job listings, videos, brochures, and other resources to showcase their organization and available positions.
  3. Interaction: Job seekers can browse through the virtual booths and interact with recruiters through various means. This may include text chat, audio calls, or video conferencing. They can ask questions, learn more about the company and its job opportunities, and submit their resumes.
  4. Presentations and Webinars: Virtual job fairs often include live or pre-recorded presentations and webinars where employers can provide insights into their company culture, job requirements, and application processes. Job seekers can attend these sessions to gain more information and interact with presenters.
  5. Networking: Some virtual job fairs offer networking opportunities where job seekers can connect with other attendees, industry professionals, or alumni from their alma mater. These networking features may include group chats, virtual meetups, or one-on-one networking sessions.
  6. Follow-up: After the virtual job fair, employers may follow up with promising candidates, schedule interviews, or provide further instructions for the application process. Job seekers can also follow up with recruiters to express their continued interest and inquire about next steps.

Virtual job fairs offer several advantages, such as eliminating geographical constraints, reducing costs, providing convenience to both job seekers and employers, and allowing for a wider range of interactions and engagement opportunities. They have become increasingly popular, especially in situations where in-person events may be limited or restricted, enabling companies to connect with a larger pool of talent efficiently.

What Are the Benefits of Hosting a Virtual Recruiting Event?

If you want to attract top talent to your organization and keep it, you can’t go wrong with a recruiting event. These events are also a great way to brand your organization and announce it to the world.

Most recruiting events were physical. Then came the pandemic, and most events went virtual for the obvious reason that people wanted to avoid exposure to COVID-19 as much as possible. This prompted employers to allow people to work remotely. Well, this concept was soon extended to recruiting events.

There are many reasons why you should host recruiting events. For one thing, you can make your workforce much more diverse through these events. It has been observed that minority students who attend lower-cost universities are much more likely to attend virtual recruiting events. You can attract the top employees to your company during virtual recruiting events provided you do the following:

Teach Attendees About Professional Development

School’s out because of COVID-19. This means that students have much more free time on their hands. They’re using this free time to learn new and valuable skills or to brush up on skills that they already knew. A professional development session will attract lots of students because these students want to learn how to think, behave, and dress like a professional.

If you are stumped as to what you should include in this type of session, take a few minutes to think about the professional skills that your organization wants and needs. Be sure to make these the foundation of your session. You are always free to add on other professional skills as needed or desired.

You have many options when hosting professional development events. They can take place in the form of online training, masterclasses, or webinars. It doesn’t matter what form of event you host; it won’t be successful if you don’t make it interesting and engaging. Also, make sure that your event adds value for your participants. Be sure to subtly explain why the attendees should be working at your organization and only at your organization.

Include Diversity and Inclusion Panels and Presentations

Students, naturally, want to work at organizations that actually promote diversity and inclusion and don’t just provide lip service. You’re going to have to do much more than include a line that says, “We support diversity and inclusion policies on your website. You’re going to have to prove it, and diversity and inclusion panels and/or presentations are a great way to do this.

This will show potential candidates that you’re serious about diversity and inclusion in your organization. You can always take pointers for these types of panels and presentations from various employee resource groups (ERGs) near you. Company leaders and current employees are also great resources to tap into for these ideas.

Freestyle Question And Answer Sessions Are Necessary 

Freestyle in this context means that the students are allowed to ask any and all questions they want. You should have a member of your executive team present to answer these questions.

Many social media and social platforms like Quora and Reddit have found these sessions to be quite useful in terms of internal communications and external marketing. Freestyle question and answer sessions put students’ minds at ease because it tells them what working at your organization is really like.

Freestyle question and answer sessions are the most successful when they focus on a particular topic. You should have a list of frequently asked questions that you can turn to in order to keep the conversation going.

Virtual Information Sessions

You always want to be building employer brand awareness. After all, you never know when you’ll need to hire employees next in the unpredictable world that the pandemic has created. This can be accomplished through a virtual information session.

You can have employees tell students all about working conditions and the corporate culture at your organization. Students love these sessions because they can ‘be themselves’ while learning all about an organization that they want to work for. Your sessions will be the most successful if you have different high-profile employees working in different break-out rooms. You can cover more topics and give the attendees more individualized attention.

Host fireside chats

Do you remember the intimate nature of those conversations by a campfire? Well, fireside chats revolve around the same concept. In these chats, employees talk honestly with students about a specific pre-selected topic.

These informal chat sessions allow you to let the students see your employees as real kind and compassionate humans. The trick is to ensure that these chats center around a specific and relevant topic.

To learn more about the benefits of hosting your own virtual hiring events or career fairs, contact the team at Premier Virtual for a free demo.

Attract Qualified Job Candidates with Virtual Interview Days

Many employers continue to struggle to attract and hire qualified candidates.
There are many different issues at play, but one thing is certain; a bad hire can cost a company an average of 240,000! – based on a study by Link Humans that was shared by SHRM.org
The astronomical costs are a result of many different factors. Here is what the SHRM report cited:
Calculating the Cost of a Bad Hire
The cost of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding a new employee can be as much as $240,000, according to Jörgen Sundberg, CEO of Link Humans, an employer branding agency in London. There are extra costs incurred when that person turns out to be a poor fit, not the least of which may involve finding a replacement. Brandon Hall Group, a human capital research, and analyst firm based in Delray Beach, Fla., identified several variables that go into calculating the cost to replace a bad hire. They include:
  • Recruitment advertising fees and staff time.
  • Relocation and training fees for replacement hires.
  • The negative impact on team performance.
  • The disruption to incomplete projects.
  • Lost customers.
  • Outplacement services.
  • Weakened employer brand.
  • Litigation fees.
While this number may surprise you if you own a company or are responsible for hiring, you know that any bad hire is a drain on your budget and often can have consequences on morale for the entire organization.
To compound the problem, a tight labor market often forces recruiters to make hasty hiring decisions. A warm seat is better than an empty seat is the mentality, and you hope to be able to train up the new hire into a good fit.
Another study by CareerBuilder points out that hiring managers can be so desperate to hire, they overlook glaring issues and offer the job anyway. It’s not always the candidate’s fault or the candidate trying to cheat on the application; it is often a poorly trained recruiter not asking all the right questions in a rush.
So, how do hiring managers attract more qualified candidates?

 

Expanding the talent pool leads to more resumes and the likelihood of interviewing more qualified candidates. When you have a larger selection, there’s a much better chance that you will find the best candidate for the position.
The traditional route of posting an opening on job boards and in-person job fairs seems to deliver the same job seekers. Companies finding success have begun to incorporate virtual hiring events and have introduced “Virtual Interview Days”, to the hiring strategy.

These virtual interview days have been a game-changer. They have revealed the pent-up frustration of qualified job candidates that apply for jobs and never hear back from the employer. All of them agree it’s better to get a ‘no’ than a no-answer. This frustration has reduced the number of job-seekers willing to send applications to job openings they believe they’ll never hear back. Instead, they seek the more secure referral or networking route, where they know they’ll be heard and will also hear back.

That’s precisely why Virtual Interview Days are so powerful. Candidates that apply realize they will at least get an opportunity to chat with the recruiter. On the Premier Virtual hiring event platform, If that chat goes well, the recruiter can invite the candidate into a video interview. This pre-screening process gives the recruiter an excellent opportunity to see if the candidate is a good match and if a formal interview needs to be scheduled. Of course, if the fit is right, the recruiter can make a job offer on the spot so that the candidate does not go back into the search and potentially lose the candidate to another job offer.
Dana Morrison, the Teacher Recruitment Manager at the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, has experienced virtual interview days’ most significant success. After just one week, they made five new hires and are very happy with the people they are attracting. The strategy has proven so successful; they are running a virtual interview day every Tuesday in October from 1 pm-3 pm. Candidates can now plan around those days and times, get their profiles ready, and recruiters can meet them virtually.

 

Premier Virtual, a future-focused hiring event platform, recognized this potential and offers this ‘virtual hiring room’ as a stand-alone option for innovative companies that prefer this option to career fairs or hiring events. By incorporating the link of a Virtual Interview Day to your job posting, not only do you receive the resumes of interested candidates, you get to chat with them and see them during the virtual interview day. Plus, the virtual hiring room is open 24/7, so candidates can stop in anytime, learn more about the company, and submit their resumes anytime for the recruiter to follow up.

 

It’s what Premier virtual has said all along, ‘Hiring Happens Here’.

 

If you are interested in learning more about your own 24/7 virtual hiring room or how you can host a virtual interview day, please schedule a free demo at www.PremierVirtual.com.

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