Organizing online recruiting events is a modern approach to the conventional hiring process. It is a smart way to hire the best talent for your organization and build brand awareness.The virtual recruiting event helps to meet the global hiring needs of your organization without setting a traditional hiring process. Such events help to build relationships with candidates and to introduce your brand in the market.

In the world post-COVID-19 Pandemic, companies prefer to select a digital-first environment and many of them have already shifted towards it. Backdrop situation has not affected the hiring process in any way and has boosted digital recruitment to different heights.

Benefits of Hosting a Virtual Recruiting Event

Virtual recruiting events provide an opportunity to widen the lens of talent acquisition. Virtual events ultimately aid in building brand awareness and bridge employees who otherwise might not know about your organization. Additionally, virtual recruiting events eradicate the need to travel to a specific location at a definite time.

Virtual events can also improve diversity since students from less known universities or employees from remote, faraway locations are more likely to attend virtual recruiting events and get hired.

With virtual events, employers can connect with students from all backgrounds, disciplines, and degrees. Ultimately, virtual events allow the prospective candidates to ask questions, virtually visit offices, and interact with employees in real-time. There is a significant rise in hiring by conducting virtual recruitment tours.

This is an added advantage to smaller firms that do not have the required staff for sourcing talent. It draws more people to attend, which ultimately saves time and company resources.

Virtual events also offer cost benefits. Sometimes, the potential candidates cannot attend regular job fairs because of lack of time and a considerable distance to travel.

These benefits prove that many organizations will adopt the advanced hiring model in the future. It's high time you master the online recruiting skills because this approach is likely to stay and advance in the near future.

Here I would like to detail some important steps to hosting a virtual recruiting event

1)   Set your Strategy and Choose the Right Technology

Setting up a Goal

The most important and foremost step is to set up a goal. You need to ask a few important questions such as What is the purpose of your event, hire the right candidates, or merely create brand awareness.

Following up will determine the content of the event, speakers, promotional resources and follow up plan. Select and opt for the best available dates and allow the team time to plan and materialize.

Choose the Right Platform

You can choose video Conferencing software like Zoom or advanced versions such as brazen. You can use two types of market software such as a simple web page: It contains a chat window where visitors can chat with recruiters or an elaborate design that is much similar to a physical career fai having booths, staff center and exhibition halls.

Organizations with a low budget can opt for simple chat box designs that meet your specific requirements.

Event promotion is another deciding factor for event success. You need to promote the event across all of your digital platforms in order to garner maximum participants.

2)   Target Specific Audience

Your team needs to be very specific about the type and genre of audience you are trying to attract which helps to make the event more specific and reachable. You also need to have a backup plan in case of any technical bugs or mishaps

Choosing the right tools can avoid mishaps, and after working remotely on digital platforms for longer time now has given the users more confidence in using solving technical glitches.

3)   Customize Your Virtual Booth

Virtual booths give you an opportunity to implement creative ideas to your target audience.

You can use a variety of pre-built template available on event platforms to customize the chatbot or design your booth

Some of the listed fields must not be missed to create a transparent and user-friendly booth

• Current open positions
• Company benefits
• Company location
• Company position and stock information

Software data collection tools can be used to check and search candidates who have attended the event based on their qualifications and the information given by the attendees in the registration form.

4)   Establish and Implement a Marketing Plan

Any event be it physical or virtual, need to be advertised on appropriate channels to get the desired results and maximize hiring. It’s essential to market the virtual event through email or advertising through public relations, social media, and other marketing events.

After the potential candidates have completed registrations, organizations need to schedule a regular email to the follow-up, social media, and other communications schedule to keep the candidates well informed on any changes in plan with time and last-day reminders.

5)   Derive and Execute After-Event Plans

This crucial step is to build a strategy of healthy relations with the attendees

If there is a long time gap after the event, candidates tend to forget and might lose interest in the company profile. After event sessions are significantly important to track the interests and responses of the attendees.  One or more enlisted tools can be used to build candidate trust and get easy access to employee information

Ask Me Anything sessions

An Ask Me Anything (AMA) session gives candidates the chance to get their questions answered on the spot in real-time. The Senior management team decides the right resources to answer and solve the queries of the candidates.

Virtual Information Sessions

Virtual information sessions can be the best possible way to create brand awareness and to curate the content for your company profile when the sole purpose is not hiring. By holding a virtual information session, you can substantially introduce prospective employees to many other characteristics of your company, work profile, and experience of working employees.

Generate Chat Questions

You can keep a moderator to help facilitate the conversation between you and the employee. Chat questions are similar to live question-answer sessions and can be a great area of interest and source of information for employees. Eventually, they will be benefited from asking several questions that they otherwise would be hesitant to ask in a conventional environment.

A fireside chat is an informal conversation that can be used after the event to connect with the audience. Some of the key persons have a chat in the conference without a formal presentation or slides.

Follow-up with Attendees

You must send an email or direct message to all of your attendees, encourage them to ask questions, thank them for attending the event, and make the event a success. Additionally, you should also calculate the conversion rate and acceptance rate of candidates.

Virtual recruitment events have a fair number of advantages over in-person career fairs since the attendees' actions can be tracked, and their responses can be easily measured by careful assessment and data collection. Further reports can also be generated by using the right technology for the future success of such events.