With virtual recruiting coming here to stay, it should be an increasing priority for your team to refine your virtual recruiting strategy. A critical part of any strategy is hosting virtual recruitment events. For that reason, we’ve written a simple guide on how to plan your first virtual recruiting event.
1. Establish Goals
This might seem like an obvious point, but its importance cannot be overstated. Before you can begin planning your recruiting event, you need to understand the purpose of your recruiting event.
How will you measure the success of your event? Are you hoping to get potential candidates to apply to new positions? Or maybe you are hoping to simply generate brand awareness. Your goal will affect everything from the type of recruiting event you’ll host to how you will measure the ROI of your event, so make sure that you have a solid understanding of your goal.
2. Decide on Your Target Demographic
Once you’ve chosen the purpose of your virtual recruiting event, your next step will be to determine the type of candidates you’re hoping to attract.
Deciding on your target demographic will help you plan a few items such as:
- Deciding on the type of event you will host. Certain events will be more appealing to certain demographics.
- Choosing the right hosts for your event.
- Planning your promotions.
3. Choose Your Event Type
There are multiple types of events you can host depending on the goals of your recruiting event.
Webinar
The most traditional virtual recruitment event is to host a webinar or info session in a lecture-style format. This will usually be a 30 minute or 60-minute event, with the first part of your event being a presentation on a particular topic and the last 15 minutes being left for questions.
For this kind of event, to attract attendees, you’ll want to choose a topic relevant to the candidates such as “How to prepare your resume” or “Interviewing 101”.
Virtual Career Fairs
While they typically require more preparation than webinar-style recruiting events, virtual career fairs are an effective way to engage with a large number of candidates in 1-on-1 conversations within a short time period.
Many recruiting teams choose to host virtual webinars and info sessions during their virtual recruiting event to have the best of both worlds.
Discussion Panels
A great way for candidates to learn more about life at your company is to host live Q&A discussion panels with current employees. Any relevant employees can be used for the discussion panel, but ideally, the panelists you choose will have a similar background to your target demographic.
Have someone on your team manage incoming questions and also make sure to prepare your own questions in case the audience comes empty-handed. Having your panelists answer prepared questions may seem useless but it will most likely prompt more questions from your audience.
4. Find Your Hosts
Finding the right host can have a large impact on the success of your event. An engaging host that can speak informatively about the right topic can dramatically improve the ROI that you see from an event.
If possible, try to use hosts for your event that are relevant to your target audience. For example, students will prefer to interact with new-grads and alumni over senior-level employees.
5. Promote Your Event
Finally, once you have your event prepared, your last step is to promote the event itself. At least 50% of your effort should go into promoting the event. After all, if nobody shows up for your event, it doesn’t matter how good it is.
If your event has a limited capacity, keep in mind that, on average, approximately 35% of your candidates will end up no-showing, so make sure to invite more attendees than you need.
