Mastering Conversational Recruitment with Virtual Career Fairs (2023)

“Conversational recruitment”– a hot talent acquisition strategy, or just a fad? We’re bringing you the answers today. You need to catch up on this new trend in the recruitment world. But first things first- what does conversational recruitment even mean? It is a technique to attract, screen and engage with candidates in a real-time setting. It helps avoid unnecessary delays, cold interactions, and one-dimensional dialogues.

Why Is Conversational Recruitment Important?

With attention spans of internet users taking a nosedive, there’s only a small window of opportunity to build relationships that are sustainable today. This is why conversational recruitment is proving to be an essential key to getting your hiring momentum up and running with full force in 2023. Let’s not forget that it simultaneously delivers a brilliant candidate experience.

Holding conversations based on instant one-on-one messaging can be achieved through multiple ways ranging from social media activity, live Q&A sessions, or even virtual career fairs. With so many success stories to show, vFairs is an expert at providing an online career fair platform for recruiters and job seekers to interact in real-time without lags (normally associated with emails), and our satisfied clients are proof:

As per the reviewer  with vFairs it was a leading-edge approach to the virtual career fair experience.

An amazing route to facilitate the personalized, secure and convenient exchange of messages, all of our clients looking to hire and source top talent have had great success at making use of vFairs audio, video and text-based chat options to communicate with prospects right on-the-spot.

Moreover, the utility of this tool extends beyond one-on-one conversations. It includes mass messaging on chat groups to further amplify messaging. Career fair exhibitors can also promote their vacancies to a broader audience without added effort here. Hear it from the clients themselves: “We believe this was a great innovative platform hosting virtual booths in a career fair, connecting candidates with potential opportunities.”- Samir M.

What Are Some Best Practices to Follow?

If you’re looking to use conversational recruitment to start connecting and conversing with prospects, whether via social platforms, or an upcoming virtual career fair, these are some best practices to keep in mind:

1) Ensure Ample Staffing to Handle Real-time Inquiries

Job seekers are very motivated to speak with employers and recruiters that are able to respond to messages instantly. With the hustle and bustle of everyday lives, people naturally gravitate towards information channels that are easy to access. Plus, they also need quick answers. To truly derive the most benefit from conversational recruitment, make sure you have sufficient staffing and resources available. These will attend to the incoming queries. The meeting schedulers and easy appointment booking feature will also allow attendees to easily reach out and initiate conversations. 

The human-to-human touchpoint should be serving significant value by delivering information to candidates about vacancies, application processes, hiring timelines, etc without cumbersome delays, or worse – no responsiveness at all.  Great examples of businesses acing this practice are the ones making use of real-time chatbots. Here the entire hiring process is structured around their needs. Brilliant at getting conversations going and spearheading round-the-clock availability, conversational recruitment becomes incredibly easy to streamline.

2) Prioritize Two-way Engagement

Put your prospects at ease and create a warm first impression. How? Your recruiters should create a feedback loop. Asking about the prospects’ field of interest, location, experience level or even career goals can provide great insights based on which vacancies can be recommended.

Another perk of using virtual events for conversational recruitment, headhunters can move away from boring scripted dialogues to actual video or audio interviews to genuinely build relationships. By investing in a talent pool that they know on a deeper level than just a job application, they are much more likely to make smarter hiring decisions and identify apt cultural fits for their organization.

3) Roll Out A Red Carpet Experience For Prospects

Your target audience is diverse, and so should be the mediums you reach them over. A multi-channel dialogue is pivotal to engage candidates over multiple platforms which is why big names use a combination of Facebook, Reddit, Messenger, or even a webinar designed to speedily promote recruitment campaigns online.

Maintaining continuous engagement and indicating an effort to find talent on the platforms where they are browsing is important. Additionally, a consistent back-and-forth dialogue in today’s connected world with job seekers also helps employer branding. 

Key Takeaways

As you may have already concluded by now, becoming a conversational recruitment rockstar is actually pretty simple. With all the technology available at your disposal, attracting and engaging with candidates is easy, fast, and best of all- provides a tremendous boost to your employer brand.

Use 2023 to become a recruitment powerhouse using a virtual career fair. Put your prospects at the center of the conversation. You can then sit back and watch how candidate experiences grow your talent pool at a turbocharged rate.