Best Virtual Career Fair Platforms - September 2020

The best virtual event platforms for recruiting along with our in depth advice

Virtual career fairs are a great way to continue hiring during the COVID-19 crisis, and should be a part of any talent acquisition team’s recruiting tools given the unique angle they provide to attract and engage talent at a low cost.

In this guide, we’ll dive into the best online career fair platforms, best practices for running a virtual career fair, pitfalls, and much more.

We spend hundreds of hours researching the best HR and recruiting software so you don’t have to. We never take money from vendors during our research phase and rely heavily on practitioners and experts to help us recommend the right software. Most of the vendors featured on our site have no commercial relationship with us, we want to feature the best software for our readers regardless. Learn more

18 Hours Researched

3 Experts Consulted

9 Vendors Reviewed

Top Online Career Fair Vendors

We track thousands of HRTech solutions, these are the best online recruiting event platforms per our research and expert council as of April 2020

Brazen

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Brazen has been a leader in the virtual career fair world for nearly a decade. In as little as 15 minutes, you can create an event and start marketing to job seekers.

Brazen’s platform has many thoughtful features that you’d expect to make it easy for job seekers to find the right “booth” within a career fair and engage with recruiters via text or video. On the employer side, there are many features to help recruiting teams efficiently engage with and vet job seekers including pre-written responses to common questions, and the ability to chat with multiple candidates at once.

Worth Checking Out:

This solution truly mirrors the experience of attending an in person recruiting event which makes for an enjoyable experience for both candidates and recruiters. Learn more about Brazen

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Brazen

XOR

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XOR's virtual career fair platform is built on top of their AI based recruiting software. Their solution allows TA teams to quickly spin up landing pages to capture event registrants. During the event, your team can setup automated screens via bots that score candidates before talking live with recruiters. If initial conversations go well, candidates can immediately schedule a full interview with the recruiting or hiring teams.

Worth Checking Out:

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XOR

eightfold

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EightFold allows companies to quickly setup virtual recruiting events. These events can include kick off presentations from the CEO, 1:1 interactions with candidates, and of course the ability to schedule top candidates directly into interviews.

Worth Checking Out:

Eightfold uses AI to give candidates insights into where they may fit into a given company based on their resume/assessment and the company’s open reqs.

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EightFold

Hopin

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Hopin's virtual events software empowers organizations to run virtual career fairs that allow job seekers and companies to come together in a simple to use platform. Their offering allows organizations to create registration pages and market a career fair. The day of, there is no need to download software for attendees as they can seamlessly enter the fair, and then engage in group sessions, or 1:1 with recruiters. There are several different options on the company side including Q&As, a speed dating format, screen shares, or pre-recorded videos. They have a $100/mo plan for smaller events, and annual plans with slightly more robust feature sets for larger organizations.

Worth Checking Out:

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Hopin

GR8 People

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GR8 People has recently launched a virtual recruiting event solution that allows companies to continue marketing and managing hiring events virtually despite COVID-19. Their tools allow companies to spin up a branded landing page for each event, leverage templates for automated communications for registration and reminders, pre-screen and invite attendees to self-schedule a time to chat with recruiters during the event, collect attendee feedback and have access to event performance reports that can be exported to the organization’s ATS.

Worth Checking Out:

GR8 People is offering this solution for free until June 2020 in response to the impact of the coronavirus on talent acquisition.

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GR8 People

Paradox

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Paradox has built a virtual recruiting platform that allows companies to quickly create, market, and run hiring events. Their chatbot, Olivia, will take registrations, remind attendees about the upcoming event, and help coordinate while the event is running. Olivia will also conduct pre-screens, and answer candidate questions while they wait to talk to a recruiter. Their platform is great for recruiting, internal mobility, or a replacement for on campus recruiting. Lastly, they have no limits on users or seats which can be a huge plus for organizations that want to run larger events.

Worth Checking Out:

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Paradox

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Use Cases

Virtual career fairs are designed to allow job seekers to engage with companies in a very similar way to how a typical career fair would work. Employees can chat in small groups or 1:1 with employees from a given company. This gives them a deeper understanding of an organization, and allows the company to get a better idea of that person’s fit for a given role.

Virtual career fairs can be used by both companies who are trying to engage talent for their own hiring needs, as well as organizations who run career fairs across many different employers. There are a few main use cases for companies:

Companies recruiting for their company: Event based recruiting is a great strategy for companies to attract and engage job seekers, especially when you are hiring in volume for specific roles. Virtual career fairs are a great way to run events while we are worried about social distancing, or really anytime given how easy they are to setup. Invite the candidates in your pipeline to an event, chat with them 1:1 for a few minutes each, and figure out which ones you want to bring into the next phase of interviews.
Employment agencies hosting job fairs: Recruiting firms that are looking to source and engage large populations of job seekers can use online career fairs to quickly vet large groups of talent with a small number of recruiters. Similar to in person event recruiting that may revolve around a happy hour, online recruiting events give recruiters time 1:1 with a candidate to understand their qualifications, personality, and goals. This means quick vetting so a candidate can be sent along to a client.
Organizations hosting jobs fairs: Schools, professional groups, and anyone else who had previously hosted job fairs can use virtual job fairs in a very similar way. You can assign “booths” to companies, and allow your job seekers to then visit these booths to learn more about the companies and show off who they are as candidates.
Job Seekers: While this page is really for the buyer of the virtual career fair software, it makes sense to talk about the job seeker as well. Job seekers can get a great feel for the organization through chatting with recruiters, and employees at companies they are interested in. This ensures a mutual fit between company and employee.
Ad Hoc Recruiting Events: Setting up a recruiting event in person can be a lot of work. You need to book a space, get food and drinks, make sure your recruiters are around, and hope the job seekers show up. Virtual recruiting events are a lot less work given the lack of physical infrastructure needed. Also, people can access these from anywhere so the attendance rates are much higher. This makes it easy to setup ad hoc recruiting events with only a few days notice and still make them a success.
Employer Branding: Virtual recruiting events are also great ways to sell your organization to companies. You can setup professional development content as part of these events with a speaker, and then pitch your employee value propositions to candidates in 1:1 chats.
Pre-Employment Testing: A virtual career fair is a great way for both job seekers and recruiting teams to understand if there is a mutual fit before a candidate is moved into the interview process. In this way, these tools are similar to other top pre hire assessment tools.

Pitfalls

While virtual career fairs can be a great way for employers and organizations to engage job seekers, there are ways of screwing these up. Here are some pitfalls to make sure you avoid:

Too many booths: Ever go to a trade show and there are hundreds of booths? It’s hard to navigate, overwhelming, and sometimes you just want to leave. It’s the same for virtual events, especially if candidates are accessing yours on mobile. Make sure you have a manageable number of booths, probably less than 50.
Staff it right: If you don’t have enough recruiters/employees to talk to job seekers, then it’s going to lead to an awful candidate experience. Make sure candidate wait time stays low, ideally less than 5 minutes.
Follow Up: Your organization needs to have a way to get candidates into your ATS, and quickly follow up to make sure they are moving forward in the interview process. There’s nothing worse than waiting two weeks after a job fair to hear back.

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Pricing

Pricing for virtual events typically depends on a few different factors depending on the vendor. Pricing will almost certainly be based on a combination of the number of events you want to do, as well as the scale of these events (number of booths, registrants, recruiters).

Our recommendation would be to commit to doing a few of these events so that you can get a sense for the value they bring to your organization, and work out the bugs that may come with the first one. This will also give you some leverage to get better pricing on a per event basis versus just signing up for one event.

Features

Here are some of the key features you should be looking for when decided between different virtual career fair vendors.

Mobile: Many job seekers access virtual events on mobile, this entire experience needs to be mobile friendly.
Customer branding: The ability to have your color/logos on the signup and events page.
Landing pages: Quickly spin up beautiful, mobile optimized landing pages to collect signups, share expectations about the event, and sell your organization/event.
Single Sign On: The ability for your job seekers and recruiters/employees/hiring managers to use SSO to access the platform.
Custom candidate information: The ability to ask custom questions of job seekers when they sign up, or before they enter a given booth.
Event reminders: Text (SMS) and email based reminders about the event.
Event tutorial: Candidates can get a quick primer on how to use the platform to make the most of their experience and cut down on tech difficulties.
Webinars: The ability to do video broadcasts to all event attendees. Great for professional development content, to share insights into different roles, or other employer branding content.
Booths: Different sections of the event with different types of people (recruiters for a given role, from a given company, hiring managers, employees, etc) so candidates can talk to who is relevant.
Booth search: Easy search for different areas of the event, especially on mobile.
Chat Timer: A timer that both recruiter and job seeker can see so that there is a natural end to the conversation.
Multi-chat: Recruiters can chat with multiple candidates at once.
Snippets: Recruiters can use pre-filled questions and responses.
Chat transcripts: Ability to send hiring managers chats, or add them to ATS for reference later in the recruiting process.
Group chats: Ability to have multiple job seekers chat with a company representative.

Questions to ask on Demos

When you do talk to vendors, we recommend you come prepared with a few questions to ask. While each team is different, here are some sample questions for virtual career fair platform providers:

How do candidates get into the ATS?
How can I setup an event landing page?
How many recruiters/registrants/booths am I limited to?
How can I brand these career fairs with my corporate info?
Can we talk about one of the roles I hire for in high volume and how I could setup an event for this role from start to finish?
What data are you seeing in terms of hires from an event of a given size?
What information can I collect on candidates beyond their resumes? Can I ask custom questions so I can prioritize candidates.

Implementation

Setting up a virtual career fair actually isn’t that hard. The event landing page can be up and running in 15 minutes. From there, it’s all about marketing the event to your talent pools, on your career site, and in job postings.

Given the event is virtual and people don’t need commute, take time off work, get child care, etc you can setup these events and have a large attendance with only a few days notice.

Best Practices

If you’re going to setup virtual events as part of your recruiting process, we wanted to share some best practices we’ve learned while putting this guide together so that you can be successful:

Leverage Career site: Make sure to use your career website to drive traffic to your virtual event’s sign up page. Obviously, a lot of job seekers with high intent are checking you out on your career page, do your best to drive this traffic to your next online event.
Leverage Job Postings: Instead of having people apply to a role on your job postings, you can drive people to a virtual career fair sign up page. This allows you to sell the candidate on your organization, and quickly get a feel for whether you want to push them into the actual interview process.
Talent Pools: Past applicants, silver medalists, talent community members and any other candidate database are great pools of talent you should be telling about your next career events.
Social Proof: Social proof your signup pages with quotes from past job seekers about your events, what makes your company a great place to work, and any other third party validation of your organization (Glassdoor ratings, awards, funding, customer logos, etc).
Set Expectations: Many job seekers have never been to a virtual career fair – let them know what to expect. Who will be there from your team, how long will they get to chat with them, how long will it take, text vs video chats, how to prepare, etc.
Candidate Notes: Just like in a normal job fair, your recruiters will meet a ton of candidates. Make sure they are taking notes immediately after talking to a given candidate so that they know whether or not they want to move them forward.

Last Advice

If your company is still hiring during COVID-19, then you’re going to want to look at virtual career fairs as a way to get in front of and convert candidates.

However, we’d say that even after social distancing becomes less important, virtual career fairs are a great way to engage talent and move them down your hiring funnel.

So, it makes sense to explore this channel for companies, recruiting firms, and organizations that run their own career fairs. Good luck!