In today’s digital era, it is easy, cost-effective, and time-saving to post a job advertisement and get the rest of the recruitment process sorted out online. However, there has always been an undeniable challenge in reaching out and convincing the right talents to be a part of your team. According to Rakuna’s Student Insights Report, the channels that are most commonly used by students during the job hunting process are School Career Fairs (87%), Networking Events (57%) and On-campus Information Session (51%). Hence, recruiters can utilize various campus recruiting event ideas as leverage to achieve better outcomes for your recruiting efforts. We compiled top 04 useful ideas that can help you to tweak your campus recruiting with creativity, and get a headstart in winning top talents.

01. Career Fairs

A career fair is never a bad idea to start within any campus recruitment campaign. For years, employers use the career fair as an efficient tool to establish and enrich their talent pipelines.

In a traditional career fair, employers and recruiting teams display and present company information, open positions, and career opportunities to prospective applicants. This event has always played a crucial role in any campus recruitment program. The popularity of career fair births a new version of career fair: reverse career fair. Contrary to the traditional career fair, the reverse one provides the candidates with a setting to showcase their capabilities and convince recruiters that they are worthy of job opportunities.

When you engage in a career fair, you’re going to run into eager candidates of all styles, stripes, and banners. But the candidates that stand out are sharp, informed, and always engaging. If you’re going to get those candidates and achieve flourishing outcomes of both traditional and reverse career fairs, it is important for recruiters to take the right steps in every phase of career fairs.

Check out ten tips on how to make the most of a career fair and catch the people you want for your organization: Top 10 Career Fair Checklist For Employers

02. National Hiring Day Events

Alongside with career fair, there is another hiring event that is commonly organized by employers in the last few years, which is National Hiring Day, or “One-day Hiring Event”. Commonly, one or several companies and organizations will join hands to organize the event. Even though it is called ‘National Hiring Day’, the date of the event can be varied depending on the organizers.

These recruiting events have always guaranteed widespread free publicity. Take a look at Google search on “National Hiring Day” and you will see a great amount of external publicity that numerous firms have got as media editors understand that their readers love large-scale hiring opportunities. Hence, to attract more potential candidates and make the most of the event, recruiters need to publish the hiring information to websites, flyers, and other channels. Prior to these events, candidates need to sign up for attendance slots and bring the required documents to the event location. The representatives of attending companies are direct interviewers. Also, the results of successful candidates will be announced on-site.

This type of event has been used widely by major firms in the United States and Canada, such as Macy’s and Avis, for general hiring purposes. A National Hiring Day is a good opportunity for recruiters to reach out and hire a large number of staff in a single-day-recruitment. For instance, Chipotle hired more than 4,000 workers in its first year and added .... In another example, as a part of the UK’s National Hiring day, the job site Indeed hosted 2000 available job offers from more than a one dozen companies. Recruiters can also achieve higher offer acceptance rate and reduce the candidate dropout rate thanks to the on-site recruitment process. Moreover, since candidates will compete with each other and will be judged at the same time, hiring managers can earn a higher percentage of hiring top candidates among all. Last of all, by organizing a National Hiring Day event, employers will have chances to efficiently establish and develop a talent pipeline for future demands.

Along with several advantages from creating a National Hiring Day, there is a common concern from recruiters about the quality of the recruitment process in this type of event. Therefore, to optimize the outcome of National Hiring Day, there are small but essential tips to keep in mind:

• Establish and utilize an unbiased Hiring Committee
• Set up requirements for the whole judging and recruiting process
• Arrange the date of the National Hiring Day event on special time frames for students, such as summer term or before graduation.

03. On-campus Meetups

Beside formal campus recruiting event ideas, hiring managers come up with several semi-formal and casual hiring sessions, including on-campus meetups. A meetup event is usually arranged with the aim of getting to know and understanding people with the same interests or capabilities. This type of event normally goes with snacks, drinks, and team activities. Nevertheless, the attendants will not be required to bring a resume nor perform an interview. The theme of the meetup can be a certain topic or just simply a social networking event.

Different from career fairs or National Hiring Day events, on-campus meetups focus more on establishing a connection with potential candidates and getting to know them better in person. By organizing or attending this type of event on campus, recruiters will have the chance to recognize the potentials of each student through face-to-face communication. At the same time, recruiters can hand out the information about the company to the students and build up a tighter relationship with the talent pool.

Hosting an on-campus meetup event will be both an opportunity and a risk to the recruiters due to its casual nature. If recruiters make it too casual, an on-campus meetup can go futile as there is no room for a professional assessment of students’ capacity. On the other hand, if recruiters host the event in an overly formal tone, a sincere, communicative relationship can not be established.

Hence, it is important for recruiters to maintain a balance between formality and casualty in a meetup environment. Recruiter needs to organize a setting that allows students to comfortably showcase their potentials. Get current employees involved and shared their stories working with the company will give more reliable and detailed experience. Furthermore, inviting top experts in the industry as a guest speaker to share career advices to students will be an amazing idea to get their attention and trust.

04. Student Competitions

Being well-known among both recruiters and job seekers, student competitions have never been absent from the list of semi-formal campus hiring events. Competitions are always an effective method to find out the most talented students in the campus. Innovative recruiters have created a wide variety of competitions , including Hackathons, to discover the best fit and top talents over the years. Universities such as The University of Manchester in the United Kingdom even encourages students to include participated competitions to enhance their resumes.

Recruiters should frequently utilize competitions as a recruiting tool as aspiring students will have the chance to demonstrate their professional understandings, skills and working attitude throughout the process. Over the course of the competitions, students are able to learn about the company’s culture, get familiar with work ethics and standard, and develop an interest in working for your company. From there, recruiters can showcase their company brand to these potential candidates and get them onto the track to become a prospective employee.

Competition as a recruiting tactic is not new. Commonly, companies who desire to crowdsource creative ideas for their business challenges while recruiting talent run competitions. Take a closer look at precedent competitions hosted by these companies can give ideas for your next competition. Hence, It is not a tough task to create your own competitions as long as your companies have goals, challenging problems, clear messages, and effective organization teams.

To sum up, it is undeniable that creative on-campus recruiting event ideas can greatly help you approach and engage top talented students in your company hiring process. If you are looking for effective event ideas to boost your recruiting efforts, don’t miss out any of these: (1) Traditional and Reverse Career Fairs, (2) National Hiring Days, (3) On-campus Meetups, and (4) Student Competitions!

To view this original post and other exciting articles, visit us at Rakuna!