Five Ways to Use Mobile at Your Next Career Fair or College Event

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

The end of summer is upon us, and with the changing seasons comes the time of year when recruiters pack up their branded pens, water bottles and post it notes and head to campus career fairs. It is officially college and campus recruiting season. The next few weeks and months will be filled with time spent dragging our campus career fair banners and stands while balancing the arm loads of career fair swag and candidate resumes. It’s exciting, tiring and a perfect opportunity to incorporate new tactics into your strategy.  

As technology driven as our lives are, most recruiters aren’t making great use of it in their campus and college recruiting, meaning that there’s room for improvement even in this familiar realm. Mobile can be a great way to engage college students both on and off campus, whether you are attending an in-person event or want to continue the conversation with your top college candidates afterwards.

Take a look at these five ways you can use mobile at your next career fair or college event to make life easier, engage students and grads more, and be a better campus and college recruiter.

Mobile video

Mobile video is the future of recruiting, so make use of it with an audience that is sure to be immersed in the technology already. Whether you hold live conversations and communications using Periscope, YouTube or Meerkat, video is a great way to share your employer brand and invite your candidate pool to learn more after the career fair. Invite candidates to follow you on these platforms right at your booth and then be prepared to stream shortly after.

TalentCatch

Using TalentCatch, you can have a new candidate enter their information on your mobile device, which takes less than a minute from start to finish. You’re not carrying around resumes or writing info on the back of a business card, and they can be automatically added to your talent network. This one is a no brainer.

SMS text messaging

Many football coaches working to earn commitment from their college recruits use text message as the main form of communication with them. Take a lesson from their playbook and do the same. With an average read rate of 97 percent, it’s a great way to stay in touch with your candidate pool.

Snapchat

I promise you this talent pool is using Snapchat on a daily basis, so join the party and invite your candidates to connect, share stories and learn more about you by tapping into the power of disappearing photos and video. Be sure to incorporate Instagram into your campus recruitment social channels too.

Email

If you think email is old school, you may not be considering the fact that it’s a big part of mobile use. According to Adestra, 45 percent of email opens occur on mobile, 36 percent on desktop and 19 percent in a webmail client. It’s a simple, effective way to stay in touch with your potential candidates.

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.   

How to Enhance Your College Career Fair Strategy

 

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

The first thing to know about any type of college recruiting program is that recruiters have to look at the long term techniques to reap the really good benefits. One of the most fundamental pieces of a successful college recruiting program is building relationships with the next generation of employees and leaders. In the next 12 years, 75% of college students will make up the current workforce. In this three part blog series we will take an in-depth look at not only the importance when it comes to engaging with college students, but how to engage and follow through.

Building and maintaining a strong presence at college career fairs can be done through increasing your competitive advantage over other companies who want the same students. Working with career centers to achieve the greatest success is just one way that recruiters can help develop their specific programs. However, there are multiple strategies that need to go into a college-recruiting program to make sure top talent is retained for your company. We’ve come up with three specific things you need to do in order to make sure build a strong foundation:

Use the Right People: Not everyone is cut out to participate in campus recruiting. When selecting recruiters to attend college career fairs you have to select the right balance of professionalism and energy. You can’t bring those who get bored easily with meeting student after student after student. You need someone knowledgeable that doesn’t divert the student’s focus to their website. Your reps will have the most influential role in recruiting fresh, top talent right out of college. If you don’t have well-trained representatives at career fairs you’ll start to notice a sharp decrease in ROI.

Maintain Proper Follow-Up: College students attend on average 2-3 career fairs each year and possibly even more during their senior year. Finding the top talent can be a challenging task as several companies are schmoozing the best talent at each college or university. If you find someone you think could match your company, follow-up starts within a week of visiting a career fair. This will let them know that you’re interested and will be following up with them shortly about new exciting career opportunities within your organization. Many times recruiters get buried in resumes and lose out on great applicants because they don’t maintain proper follow-up.

Utilize the Right Tools: When a recruiter visits a career fair they are inundated with hundreds of resumes and which can become overwhelming at times. Talent Circles has created TalentCatch, an iPad app that drastically reduces the amount of time it takes for a recruiter to capture a candidate record. With TalentCatch, recruiters are allowed to add new candidate information to Talent Circles talent network and if you don’t use Talent Circles, you are able to export candidate information in a simple Excel spreadsheet to continue the conversation with candidates by email.

What strategies have you undertaken to enhance your own college recruiting program as it relates to career fairs and campus recruiting?

Download Talent Circles College Recruiting: Engage whitepaper for more information about TalentCatch and how you can spruce up your college recruiting practices.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 


Photo Credit.