Organizing a job fair involves a lot of preparations and tasks to be completed. Apart from hiring volunteers for the day of the fair to assist with setup, you also need to look after staff registration, name tags for participants and ensure smooth functioning of the event.
An emerging alternative in these times - the virtual job fair. GMetri’s immersive browser-accessible XR job fairs can not only help ease organizing the event but also recreate the curiosity and format of a job fair allowing you to explore the fair along with a virtual assistant to guide and explain the different departments and roles in your organization. This can additionally be accessed by jobseekers and internal employees alike to go through interactive Job Descriptions and apply directly.
What is a Job Fair?
When job seekers enter the event, they head straight to the registration /information desk. After the registration, the attendees can go to the booths/tables set up by the employers. Alternatively, if there are ongoing or soon to begin seminars, the attendees can walk towards the respective hall/room and join the seminar.
Job Fairs also have signs that help direct job seekers to the correct location and guide them to the room. There also are a group of volunteers to ensure the smooth functioning of the entire event.
Problems faced in traditional Job Fairs
A Logistics Challenge
- The chosen location needs to hold the anticipated number of attendees, exhibition stalls, and also need to have sufficient parking.
- Apart from the cost included to hire a location, the budget of a job fair also covers table and chair rentals, audio-visual equipment, volunteers, printing costs, roller banners, refreshments, and paper supplies.
- Employers participating in the event will need electrical power for their televisions, computers, and other equipment. Setting up this and ensuring proper working conditions throughout the event is an additional overhead for the organizers.
Large Gatherings and the Pandemic
- The risk and fear of COVID-19 has made it even more difficult to organize physical job fairs. Following the norms, ensure social distancing adds up to the budget of the event.
A One-time Event
- Job fairs engage the audience for the time they stay alive, and the attendees’ experience ends with them walking out the door. You have limited time to interest them and answer their queries.
Video Calls Just don’t cut it
- To address the above-mentioned problems, virtual job fairs are being organized via online platforms and video calling. However, this doesn’t give the “Wow” factor that offline career fairs offer. On regular video calls, connecting with people is just not the same.
What is a Virtual Job Fair?
A virtual job fair, also called virtual career fair is similar to traditional job fairs minus the need to step out of your home. It is an online event, where the job seekers and recruiters can meet virtually via the channel or stream in which the job fair is organized. Participants can chat, attend or host conferences.
Solutions with Virtual Job Fairs created in XR
- The look and feel created in an XR-based Job Fair is one of physical space, to build familiarity and the value of a brand.
- You can choose virtual ‘tracks’ that you might be interested in.
- There is also a ‘concierge’ for information on the event, and general inquiries.
- There are live or recorded webinars and seminars that you can join in on.
- There are collaborative spaces, where co-participants can discuss and meet and exchange ideas. We can even host virtual hackathons.
- There are counters which can represent different departments in the organization.
- There are entertaining, engaging, gamified quizzes and activities that keep the morale up, and people excited. Giveaways like in real job fairs are integrated.
- There are showcases for each role, and virtual guides people can speak with and ask FAQs to.
- In addition to that, you can also have AMA sessions with senior leaders periodically. Since they don’t have to travel and can log in from the comfort of their homes / offices, they can spend more time, and you can afford to bring in senior leaders to these.
How to organize a virtual job fair with XR and features that can be included
Welcome Area
The participants will come inside a virtual space where they will be welcomed to the Job Fair by avatars or real-life characters. Here we can add banners, videos, images, etc to draw attention to features.
Virtual Job Fair
The participants will now get inside the fair and take a tour of different stalls placed inside. Each stall will represent a specific Role or Department of the company. On clicking them the user will get inside the stall and can look around at the different job openings in the company based on the specific role.
Interactive JD
Now that the participants are inside the stall, they can view the job description in an interactive format. Here they get more information about the job opening by clicking on the different subheadings of the JD. The participants can also apply to the job directly from here.
Analytics:
One of the largest advantages that you get with online events is the ability to get to know the applicants better. Expect better knowledge about your cohort, with insights on what roles they are eyeing the most.
Impact of organizing a Job Fair with XR
Apart from addressing all the problems faced with offline and traditional online methods of organizing job fairs, the Extended Reality approach has proved to be beneficial in many other ways.
Accommodating the natural attention span of attendees in the online seminars hosted by employers is difficult. However, with the feature-rich and most importantly, self-paced XR experiences, it is easy to create interesting content that people come back to even after taking breaks.
The after-hours networking advantage offered in offline job fairs is taken away with video-based ones. With XR, there are options for creating fun opportunities for people to bond. One can create Escape rooms to bring people together.
There are clear advantages of virtual job fairs in virtual reality with the power of the GMetri XR Metaverse platform. Workplaces are going virtual, your recruitment must go virtual as well. Start the journey today, you can request a callback here.
You can read more about What is XR, here on the Virtual Reality Blog - Just About Real.
