Preparing for your latest job fair? As you spend a full day frantically packing your signage, gathering your business cards and concepting your booth game, your savviest competitor has already reached out to six candidates – each more qualified than you will meet at your fair.
How did they do it? By realizing long ago that job fairs are a dying recruiting tactic and evolving their strategy.
Below, find five reasons job fairs are overrated:
- The concept of gatherings has gone virtual – What is a job fair but a gathering where candidates and recruiters can all meet in one convenient location? The problem with this statement is that large gatherings of people are rarely, if ever, convenient. Between the pushing, shoving, traffic and yelling – large gatherings are the furthest thing from convenient. Online gatherings, on the other hand, are efficient and scalable. Candidates and recruiters find and chat with only those that match their dual needs. Within minutes, dozens of chats can take place in a forum or LinkedIn group, each more fruitful than the random connections that happen at a fair.
- Efficiency of Scale – At a full day job fair, how many candidates can you realistically connect with that are a bullseye for your needs? And even if your answer is a high number, how many of these same candidates can you realistically hope to connect with after the event, knowing they are speaking to hundreds of recruiters just like you? Now, what if you were to spend a full day member targeting digitally, pre-qualifying candidates based on their history before connecting with them directly?
- Savvy employees connect online – Efficiency of scale cuts both ways. Savvy candidates know that standing out online is far easier than standing out in a room full of hungry candidates competing for the same position. As such, the savviest employees are reaping dividends by making themselves stand out from the crowd online.
- Time… - How much time goes into prep for any job fair? Days, weeks, months? And after all the prep is done, you will spend anywhere from four to eight hours away from your office, fighting for a wireless connection, risking falling behind on other key tasks and messages – all for a game of networking roulette with distracted candidates who may not even be qualified. Instead, why not spend two hours meeting twice as many candidates – each qualified – by spending one hour searching in social channels? The best part is, it’s a task that practically begs for you to multi-task.
- and Money - Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, blogs – all free. (Note – advertising and some member targeting will require some cost, but relatively nominal.) Compare this against the cost to just get in the door of a job fair. Why not try something that’s cheaper AND has the potential to work better?
So what do you think?
Are we way off base about job fairs, right on the money, or did we ultimately just give you something to chew on? We welcome your comments.
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I may be biased, but I absolutely agree that the future of recruiting is moving online. Online recruiting allows companies to reach out to both passive and active job seekers. Compare that to job fairs, which (as mentioned in this article) are inconvenient to attend, and you are going to miss out on both active and passive candidates. You can reach a larger portion of your target audience online, and for a lower cost.
Social media recruiting, in particular, has the added benefit of increasing referrals. Identified, for example, allows companies to see which of their employees are connected to a particular candidate, and ask for a referral.
Identified has many other features that may benefit your recruiting efforts, including search, a job posting/news section and the ability to download resumes and contact candidates directly. For more information, visit http://www.identified.com or contact jennifer@identified.com.
Jennifer Picard
Marketing Manager, Identified
http://www.identified.com