5 Ways to Market Your Multi-Employer Career Fair to Candidates

A successful multi-employer hiring event brings together lots of employers and (with the right marketing strategy) even more candidates. That's why it’s important to make sure you’ve got a plan that reaches your different target audiences and is tailored to each in tone, medium, and messaging.

So what can you do to make sure you’re driving top candidates to your event? Here are a few best practices to make sure your hiring event attendance numbers hit the mark.

1) Leverage LinkedIn

Use the premium features and ads LinkedIn provides to find professionals that match your employers’ preferred attendee profiles and promote your event based on your target personas, job titles, and industry. Also, leverage the strengths of your attending employers’ brands and featured job opportunities by giving attending employers pre-made posts and marketing materials to share in their own LinkedIn pages to get extra traction. If people are following these companies and brands already, odds are great that they’re already highly engaged with these organizations and would be very interested in knowing where their dream employers are looking for candidates next.

2) Work on Your Event Registration Page

Your event registration page is one of the most important points of contact for potential attendees of your multi-employer career fair. Make a good impression by keeping it clean, informative, and to the point so visitors can sign up quickly and get the information they went to get, and fast. Ensure your overall design supports this goal in order to deliver a seamless experience that delivers a positive first impression of your event. Here are a few things we see that all fantastic registration pages have in common. They:

• Showcase featured employers’ logos 
• Spotlight the event industry
• Embed a compelling event overview video
• Highlight speakers and event leaders
• Include information about what the event experience will be like
• Offer links to resources on how to use your event platform
• Feature useful FAQs for both first-time and returning attendees
• Are customized to showcase your event and organizations' brands, event hosts, event features, virtual career fair platform perks, and unique offerings to job seekers

3) Send Out Signals on Social Media

Many job seekers interact with their personal social media channels often, so it’s a great place to advertise your event and have it shared by members with their groups, networks, friends, and families. But to get the best results, get to know your audience well first! Research what times they most likely engage with their channels of choice and build out a promotional strategy that attracts their attention while staying true to the core of your event branding.

4) Leverage Email Marketing to Your Talent Database & Try Co-Marketing

Promote your event to all target career seekers in your database via email. But don't just send the same messages to everyone; segment your attendees by predetermined criteria to hone your messaging and make sure it's seen by the right people. Bonus points if you’re hosting a targeted event and can focus your promotions on the sub-set of people who best fit the types of employers and roles that this event will focus on through list segmentation. So if your employment fair is focused on entry-level job seekers, single them out to deliver email messaging that is specially impactful and meaningful to them by highlighting key event features that will speak directly to them, such as key job providers, a compelling event broadcast, or interesting event booths.

Also, there may be additional opportunities for promoting your event to outside partners, affiliated organizations or associations, college or university groups, and more, so find additional opportunities to promote your event through email marketing by leveraging both old and new relationships. Just remember that working together takes more time, so forge these agreements well in advance of your intended event date.

5) Use Paid Channels to Advertise Your Event

Since not all potential talent is exposed to the same media equally, it’s important to understand your target candidate audience and make sure you’ve budgeted to promote your events where they are likely to be spending their time and attention. From PPC to display advertising, there are a wide variety of channels you can use to advertise your multi-employer job fair. To reach your desired job seekers effectively (particularly those that don't spend a lot of time in front of screens), you may also want to consider other forms of advertising, such as newspaper, TV, radio spots, or even sponsoring a podcast! We even had a client buy local time to promote their hiring event during the SuperBowl to outstanding results! Get creative with your future in-person events or virtual events advertising and always consider who you are trying to reach before your start.

Like this post? Try these!

• 5 Benefits of Making Virtual Events a Part of Your Multi-Employer Event Strategy

• Why You Need To Double Down on Recruitment Marketing Right Now
• 5 Creative Ideas for Multi-Employer Job Fairs
• 5 Tips for Successful Multi-Employer Career Fairs

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