Joe Milner, the talent acquisition manager at educational publishing and assessment giant Pearson, was at a campus event in Northern California when a company executive broached the virtual career fairs idea of bringing in some of the promising students to the company’s primary locations in other states for interviews.
“We started to do the math on airfare, hotels, all that stuff, and it starts getting expensive,” Milner says.
It’s a common problem. How to scale up and diversify entry-level hiring across multiple college campuses is a conundrum that is front and centre for many organizations as the labour market continues to tighten.
Recognizing this new reality, Pearson has decided to leverage technology and create a virtual career fair platform that allows experts to interview groups of candidates from multiple campuses simultaneously via videoconferencing. Virtual career fairs for students! – “This is really going to give us a chance to not just limit ourselves to the local candidate pools,” Milner says. “It’s going to be a real positive for us.”
More companies are turning to virtual career fairs to find more diverse, qualified talent from a wider pool of colleges.
Virtual Career Fairs for Students
1) Leveraging Technology
Virtual career fairs for students remain a vital way to connect with top young talent across nearly all industries. According to an analysis of the 2018 campus recruiting season by talent acquisition technology firm Oleeo and employer branding firm Universum, virtual career fairs, & on-campus events ranked behind only employer websites among the top ways students learn about job opportunities.
Campus events are an important component of Pearson’s talent recruitment strategy, particularly for associate software engineers and associate project management roles within its technology organization. The strategy largely has been centred around physical career fair events at key corporate locations such as Phoenix, Boston and New Jersey, Milner says, where graduating college students would attend in person.
“That left a ton of potential talent out there,” Milner says. “We started looking at how we could leverage technology to start doing virtual career fairs for students.” For Pearson, the goal was to replicate aspects of its very specific real-world career fair formula in a virtual career fairs platforms setting.
At its on-site fairs, Pearson typically brings in groups of 15 or more students who are set to graduate within 60 days. It breaks them up into different phases, with some students completing one-hour sessions in which they can showcase their programming knowledge. Next, the company runs them through speed interviews in which multiple managers and team members conduct six-minute interviews on different topics. The events end with a group problem-solving exercise that allows the company to see how individuals engage with each other.
“It gives us a chance to really get a wide range of insight into the candidates, but also allow them to meet quite a few of our different managers too,” Milner says.
2) Going Virtual
During its first virtual career fairs for students, which took place this year, Pearson kept it small, inviting six students from different universities around the country who had indicated they were on the job market. Milner says the candidates seamlessly rotated through video interviews with different hiring managers in a range of departments.
Milner says the actual virtual career fairs platforms technology required very little training for the hiring managers, who were already familiar with videoconferencing. It also proved immediately successful: Pearson offered positions to two candidates based on the virtual interactions alone, and one is set to start this month.
“The biggest takeaway is that the virtual career fairs for job seekers are a great chance to explore students from other schools & ensure we’re getting exposure to some great talent out there,” he says. “I think this will be a necessary part of our virtual career fairs mix.”
In addition to allowing companies to greatly expand their reach [virtual career fairs for students] to find talent from often-overlooked campuses, virtual career fairs offer efficiency and cost savings for HR departments. For example, the virtual career fairs platforms could schedule a candidate for a two-hour virtual window and assign a hiring manager for each 30-minute section. “There’s no coordination with the campuses,” he says. “There’s no travelling for their hiring managers. There’s time reduction, there’s cost reduction.”
Cooke says interest in virtual career fairs is increasing as the labour market becomes even tighter. “It’s a very hot topic right now,” he says. “ I think it’s ultimately the labour shortage. It’s so hard to find the right candidate that simply going to your local campus to hire or a couple of major campuses throughout the year, isn’t enough. There’s talent at some of these smaller campuses that are being missed.”
Virtual career fairs for students ensure we explore and hire those best talents that were never hired or explored before. Undoubtedly, virtual career fair platforms today are breaking barriers in the hiring industry. Book demo with Hexafair now!