How to accelerate your hiring process with virtual hiring events

Reducing time to hire saves time and money, while helping you better compete for top talent. Speeding up the time it takes to move candidates through your recruiting funnel has similar benefits, on top of enhancing the candidate experience. These are just two major benefits of accelerating your hiring process, and there is no more efficient or effective way to do that than with virtual hiring events.

Many industries have roles open for months on end, and we’ve heard from recruiters across industries in our community that some of these positions get as few as one or two applications per role. Clearly, this is a problematic formula for hiring. Budget and hiring goals suffer, recruiting teams are more likely to experience stress and burnout, and candidate experience may also be negatively impacted.

Speeding up your time to hire is not only possible, but it’s also easily accessible with a strategy we’re calling “one-and-done” hiring events. Here’s how it works.

Contextualize your Goals

So you've chosen a virtual career fair platform—great! But before you start planning your next virtual hiring event, it’s best to start with a thorough understanding of what happens in your hiring funnel—and which areas you’d like to improve. We suggest looking at data on:

• How long candidates are in your pipeline,
• What percentage of candidates are active vs. passive, and
• At what stage of your funnel you are losing the most candidates.

With this information, you can set some goals and design virtual hiring events to address the problem areas in your recruiting funnel.

Speed up Sourcing

In sales, they have the ABCs: “Always be closing.” In TA, it’s more like ABS: “Always be sourcing.” Continuously sourcing talent to populate your talent community makes it easier and faster to fill new job reqs when they open.

Rather than thinking entirely about how to source candidates to apply for a specific position or role, think bigger. Think about what types of candidates would want to attend your virtual hiring events—and offer events that match those priorities. Informational events—where candidates can learn about your organization and ask questions—are often effective. Many of our customers are also getting great results by hosting large virtual events to screen or prequalify candidates, and then host a later event (virtually or onsite) for interviews.    

Another crucial strategy for attracting more candidates to your pipeline (and keeping them engaged longer) is to drive candidates directly to virtual hiring events from your job ads. Rather than sending them to an in-depth application, you can funnel them to a brief event registration form and collect their basic contact info. If they attend your event, you can engage with them there and if they don’t, you can invite them to other events and notify them about other available positions that might fit their profile.

Speed up Consideration & Selection

Many Brazen clients are successfully collapsing the hiring process through an expedited strategy, the “one-and-done” virtual hiring event. This approach deprioritizes the application form (consider making it part of the new hire paperwork that is completed once an offer is accepted) and puts virtual hiring events front and center.

Within a few weeks, you can plan, design, promote, and host a virtual hiring event that takes candidates from initial screening to interview and even (if you choose) to a job offer. Moving candidates this quickly through the hiring process delivers an engaging, exciting candidate experience—and reduces the odds you’ll lose a candidate to another employer.

The one-and-done hiring event is most effective when you tag in help from other HR team members (e.g. more people performing the screening stage so candidates can go straight to hiring managers) and empower hiring managers to interview and make offers as fast as possible. This works best when recruiters and other screeners understand what matters most to hiring managers so they can easily identify those qualities in candidates. Executive leaders need to hold hiring managers accountable for their part (e.g. not holding up the hiring process by taking days/weeks to review candidates, etc)—all the more reason to move through as many stages of the recruiting process during a single virtual hiring event as possible

Speed up Onboarding

Virtual events can be extremely valuable during the onboarding process, too—even for onsite positions. Employers are still reporting losing candidates between offer acceptance and start date, and this problem can often be remedied with more communication and proactively integrating pre-hires into company culture before they even start working. Hosting virtual team meet-and-greets, new hire orientation, employee resource group gatherings, and other culture events are great ways to keep interest and engagement high between offer acceptance and start date.

Win with “One-and-Done” Hiring Events

Speed doesn’t always equal quality—but where hiring is concerned, time is of the essence. Today’s job seekers have lots of options and they mean business. Hosting one-and-done virtual hiring events shows candidates that you do, too. Moving candidates quickly through the recruiting process also demonstrates that you value their time, that you know what you’re looking for, and that every job opening is important. This is how your organization can win at hiring in 2023 and beyond, and it's a strategy your team should strive for in order to remain competitive in the years ahead.

Like this post? Try these!

• Don't Let Your Application Form Narrow Your Talent Funnel

• How to Grab Candidate's Attention (and Why It's More Important Than Ever)
• Work Smarter, Not Harder: Using Technology to Amplify Great Candidate Experiences
• 5 Metrics You Should Be Tracking for a Successful Virtual Hiring Event

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