Technology has revolutionized the playing field across the enterprise. It has also changed how employers and employees meet, interact, and function together. For example, career/job fairs have been around for quite some time, enabling job seekers to search for and embrace the right employment opportunity.
However, the newly emerging online career fair gives the traditional job fair a tough competition with rich and dynamic user experience, perfect setup and execution, in-depth post-event analysis, better hiring outcomes, and many more perks to offer. Thus it is no wonder that everyone starting from universities to organizations and trade associations to employment agencies, participate in virtual career fairs.
What is meant by a virtual career fair?
A virtual career fair is an online event similar to an organized webinar at a specific time. Employers and job seekers have virtual meetings with the help of technologies like teleconferencing, chat rooms, webcasts, and email to exchange information about employment opportunities. It also allows the recruiters to meet the candidates after reading the resume virtually. All of it happens in a comfortably seamless experience, which takes the hassle of visiting a traditional job fair out of the equation.
Advantages of a virtual career fair
A virtual event has several benefits to offer for which organizations and agencies are turning towards virtual career fairs as their prime recruitment strategy. Some of the benefits of an online career fair are as follows:
- Virtual career fairs give the scope for better targeting than physical career fairs with the capacity of pre-qualifying candidates by screening the resumes and other relevant information about their qualifications before the event.
- They restrict the unconscious bias faced by job seekers based on their physical appearances and gestures by allowing them to make a calculated digital first impression to their leverage.
- Online job fairs are an excellent source of real-time information and data, which allows for sound and insightful post-event analysis and can also be used to improve event quality.
- They allow companies to hire candidates from diverse backgrounds because of their accessibility to job seekers from various locations, backgrounds, and experiences.
- A virtual career fair is cost-effective in all ways. It is much cheaper to organize a virtual job fair than a traditional job fair. Moreover, it is much more convenient and affordable for job seekers to attend, so it’s beneficial on both sides.
- It can attract a larger audience under the present circumstances of the pandemic. The COVID-19 situation has stimulated the growth of virtual career fairs. These are the only possible alternatives to traditional career fairs that are difficult to organize in this situation with the stay-at-home directives and quarantine guidelines issued by the WHO and several governmental agencies.
Conclusion
While an online career fair always had its own perks to offer, it has become genuinely indispensable for organizations as their recruitment strategy in the pandemic. It is also more beneficial to organizations as it will help to reduce expenditures incurred in the hiring process in a downward economy. Experts are predicting that the recruitment landscape will be predominantly virtual in the foreseeable future. They eliminate hurdles like expensive setups, geographic barriers, and travel expenses to make employment opportunities easily accessible to the unemployed youth of America.
