A Guide for Interviews at Virtual Career Fairs

Thanks to the magic of a virtual career fair, meeting your company's future leaders is easier than ever, thanks to a pleasant online environment that job seekers and recruiters will be familiar with. 

While a face-to-face event takes away many of the legwork and hassles of doing, there is still work to be done in preparation. And in some ways, it requires a completely different approach. Despite a comfortable experience, the more seriously you take your planning and execution, the more success you will achieve, and the better impression you can make on recruited people.

At Endless Fairs, we are here to provide some useful aspects for your virtual interviews to help your recruiting team succeed at your big event. Here are some tips for interviewing distant candidates at your virtual career fair while having fun along the way.  

Act Like It's a Real Interview 

The ability to recruit at scale with optimum convenience and minimal cost legitimized this new trend strategy to recruit teams of all sizes. Meeting talents at a virtual career fair and bringing them into the conversation process with video conferencing software may have started off as a sleek gimmick, like many advances in technology. However, there is nothing deceiving about the results businesses discover through a successful virtual career fair.

Meeting potential recruits on webcam can be jarring at first compared to the comfort of a solid handshake in a face-to-face meeting. But in our increasingly digital and connected world, this is a natural progression in the way we work and deserves the same belief in physical experience as we know so well.

Test Your Hardware

Once your virtual career fair is set up and ready to take action, it's time to perfect the individual equipment your team will use to access the event and interact with candidates. First, check that the computer and webcam you will be using are of high quality and in good working order. It is useful to check more than once. In this call, you represent not only yourself but your organization as a whole. Hence, having equipment that is both working and has good image resolution and sound quality is a valuable investment. 

Have Questions, Answers, and Informational Content Ready

The structure of your interview is not far from what you would expect from a physical interview. You need to ask the most relevant questions about the role and be consistent in many of your planned conversations. You have limited time with each potential recruit, so while leaving time for the candidate to provide thoughtful and descriptive answers, think long and hard about what questions are really important.

Don't forget to leave room for candidates to ask their own questions! However, you should prepare an answer sheet for some of the questions you can expect. We recommend both digital and printed versions for your critical notes so the best possible answers and information are available during interviews, stay extra efficient and influence candidates in the process!

An additional benefit of the virtual format is the ability to access and share digital content on the same platform before, during or after the interview. Work with your marketing team and project managers to write useful content about your brand's mission, company culture, positions you have interviewed, and other timely information that might come up in an interview. Not only is this content worth sharing with candidates, it can also be a handy reference for many talking points you can address during a busy day at your virtual career fair.

With all this preparation and structure, we recommend that you have a good time in your interviews to make your candidates comfortable. A few light jokes or moments of improvisation may be what candidates remember the most and make them want to work with you instead of other opportunities. In other words, be sincere.

Know What You Need and Spend Your Time Efficiently

Depending on the length and popularity of your virtual career fair, you can talk to a sizable talent pool, each with their own unique experiences, skills, and personality quirks. So what are you actually looking for? This question seems obvious, but any added insight is a redemptive blessing, especially when interviewing on a large scale and quickly back-to-back.

Think about the roles you fill and what qualities will make a candidate rise to the top of the stack. As you work through interviews, get to the point with your questions so you don't worry about critical details later. 

Whether it's a day or a few, you may be interviewing many candidates during your event, and time management here is more important than meeting face to face. Organize your questions ahead of time and know what to look for in their answers so that in a short period of time you can identify the key features and not let the right people escape from wrong questions or by emphasizing less important answers. 

Some conversational recruitments at your event can help you get to know candidates and narrow the space that goes into actual interviews so you can skip surface-level questions and move on to higher-level questions when the interview returns.

Check out some sample templates here to keep track of your virtual candidates and then add your signature touch to really make them shine!

Meet Talents at Virtual Career and Job Fairs with Endless Fairs

With the virtual event platform offered by Endless Fairs, market your company strongly and reach the right talents from all over the world. Contact us now for detailed information!