Career fairs bring exciting opportunities for both job seekers and companies to learn about each other and interact. As an employer, these events give you chances to scout and attract the brightest students and fresh graduates. Thus, you should not only spend time preparing for career fairs but also evaluating your performance and identify areas for improvement. To have the most accurate performance evaluation is to grasp the right statistics. Hence, career fair statistics are necessary tools to evaluate the success of events and optimize your performance. Understanding the following statistics can help you improve your campus recruitment strategy.

01. Pre-event Communication Effectiveness

A great number of students are looking for job opportunities from career fairs and companies’ websites. According to Rakuna’s Student Insights Report, nearly 90% of students are looking for jobs at career events, and two-thirds of them have searched for job postings on companies’ websites. Thus, it is advisable to get the word out about your participation via the fairs’ communication channels, company’s social media channels, and your company’s website before the event. As a result, you can increase participants’ awareness about your company as a potential employer and attract more candidates to your booth.

You can measure pre-event communication effectiveness with two indicators:

• • The number of sign-ups: If you plan to organize a small activity which requires sign-up, this is a must-have indicator.

• The number of leads who receive the message of your pre-event communication efforts and decide to attend: This indicator can be measured with a simple question such as how they know about your participation at the fair.

Based on the results, you can improve your communication strategy and take advantage of successful channels. These channels may be events’ organizers’ media, company-owned media, or collaboration with other parties. You can also decrease your cost per lead if applicable.

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02. Attendance Data

Attendance stats are necessary career fair statistics for any campus recruitment manager. You should measure the two following stats to evaluate your success in attracting the target group.

• • The number of booth visitors/ total event visitors: This ratio tells you about the overall attractiveness of your company at the event, which depends on the employer’s pre-event marketing efforts and performance at the event.

• Booth visitors in categories: They can be categorized based on their level of education, area of interests, or jobs they are planning to apply. You will learn whether you are targeting the right groups or not, and what you should do to improve.

For example, you have successfully attracted a large number of students. However, visitors are mostly freshmen while you are looking for fresh graduates to fill the available positions. Attendance data tells that your company has targeted the wrong group, and thus, a campus recruitment manager has to make adjustments to marketing channels and activities at upcoming career fairs.

03. Visitors' Level of Engagement During Event

Some factors are influencing the engagement of visitors during events, including employers’ giveaways, mini activities, or interactive games. Booth’s setting and design, as well as company representatives’ performance, also affect visitors’ experience. As a campus recruitment manager measures how visitors engage with the company’s booth, he or she can learn about how effective the company’s marketing efforts are and identify some ideas to test or areas for improvement.

04. Visitors’ Level of Engagement Post-event

After each event, you should also measure your visitors’ responsiveness towards your post-event communication. These activities include social media content, newsletter and job opportunity emails, or follow-up interviews. The stats or indicators used vary between companies and marketing channels. In general, analyzing this data will show campus recruitment managers the impact of their marketing efforts on building employer branding or expanding the talent pool.

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05. Overall Performance

Along with several career fair statistics measured after each stage of the event, recruitment managers should also evaluate and monitor the overall performance indicators.

Here are some key indicators to be taken into your evaluation process:

• The total number of people engaging, including those who sign-up in the database, leave their information, send CVs or apply for jobs. These numbers show how your campus recruitment activities contribute to the company's database and talent pool for future hiring opportunities.
• The number of qualified candidates: Scouting bright talent is one of several common goals of many companies going to career fairs, which makes this a necessary indicator for your overall performance.
• Cost for recruitment activities, including marketing campaigns, materials, and other costs, per candidate or people signing up: These indicators play an important role in measuring your success and calculating return on investment (ROI).

Recommendations

The list of indicators used may vary depending on employers’ recruitment goals, but campus recruitment teams should expect to receive a great amount of data from students. As out of 3 expect to hear back from employers within one week post career fair based on Rakuna’s Student Insights Report, your recruiting team needs several tools to organize your database and plan your actions to give prompt responses to talents before competitors.

Recruitment teams should implement HR technology into their processes to optimize the overall performance. HR tools can ease the burden of time-consuming manual tasks, create a streamlined candidate database, and measure the quality of recruiting sources. As a result, campus recruiting teams can invest their time effectively in other tasks such as developing engaging activities and relationship with candidates, creating attractive marketing materials, and building strategy. Another helpful feature of some limited HR apps is to provide reporting tools to track your ROI. The meaningful visuals provided also help you evaluate the overall performance effectively and effortlessly.

Conclusion

In conclusion, knowing and understanding which career fair statistics to measure and monitor are needed to optimize your campus recruiting strategy. Recruiting teams should constantly track and monitor stats to keep your recruitment endeavors stay on track. You can use recruitment tools to optimize your performance, build an effect...