5 Reasons Virtual Recruiting Events are the Secret to Recruitment Marketing Engagement

Recruitment marketing is, in short, how employers get the word out about their job openings—as well as their culture, mission, compensation and benefits, and anything else that helps attract their ideal candidates. Recruitment marketing budgets vary by industry, company size, location, and talent availability. The only universal truth is that every organization wants to see an ROI for their recruitment marketing strategy and spending.

At the beginning of the Great Resignation in August 2021, employers leaned into recruitment marketing even more, in an effort to compete for talent. With the ongoing talent shortage in many industries, recruitment marketing continues to play a crucial role in talent acquisition. But recruitment marketing only works if people engage with your organization as a result of those efforts.

A Recruitment Marketing Strategy for 2023

You need a recruitment marketing strategy that enables candidate engagement, and virtual recruiting events are a highly effective way to boost recruitment marketing engagement. Let’s explore how virtual recruiting events boost recruitment marketing engagement.

Virtual Recruiting Events Create a More Engaging Candidate Experience

Our clients see better conversion rates when they give candidates a chance to talk to someone before they tackle an hours-long application. After all, most job seekers have a lot of questions they need answered before they can decide how interested they really are in a potential employer. Engaging in conversations early on gives you an opportunity to answer those questions and grow their interest, and virtual recruiting events are the perfect vehicle for those conversations - all to boost the return on your recruitment marketing strategy.

If your job ads are still directing job seekers to an online application form, it’s likely you’re losing a lot of candidates you actually want to meet. Many of our clients are using virtual recruiting events as calls-to-action instead and seeing much higher levels of engagement as a result. Also, a majority (83%) of job seekers prefer virtual hiring events to traditional models of recruiting, and giving candidates what they want is the simplest way to improve the candidate experience.

Recruiting Events Enable Brand & Messaging Consistency

Recruitment marketing sets candidates’ expectations about your employer brand, and conversations bring your recruitment marketing to life. Virtual recruiting events allow you to create immersive brand experiences for your candidates and engage in meaningful conversations about your organization’s mission, values, and culture. Aligning your recruitment marketing strategy with candidate personas helps take this concept even further, and we’ve shared some great advice on this from Christina Spadaro, Global Talent Brand Manager at Workhuman and in other articles.

Recruiting Events Accelerate the Hiring Process

Speed is the key to competition in a tight talent market. Virtual recruiting events allow you to streamline the hiring process and reduce time to hire, improving the efficiency of your recruiting efforts. From the candidate perspective, moving quickly through the recruiting funnel demonstrates that you value their time—and might reduce the chance that they turn their attention elsewhere. Actions speak loudly to candidates today. And that's a vital consideration for any modern recruitment marketing strategy.

Virtual Recruiting Events are Highly Scalable

Scalability, flexibility, and accessibility are three key reasons virtual recruiting events continue to be such a valuable part of successful recruitment marketing strategies. Virtual recruiting events allow you to screen hundreds of candidates in a short amount of time, and the ease of setting up new events (especially with event templates) means you can move faster when responding to changing business needs. And this part of the candidate experience speaks volumes to candidates, reminding us that our recruitment marketing is about more than just what we say - a savvy recruitment marketing strategy is also optimizing what we do. 

Recruiting Events Humanize the Recruiting Process

Virtual recruiting events allow your team to meet candidates face-to-face, no matter where they are located. And because virtual recruiting events can be held on different days and times of day, and are accessible on any mobile device with no app download required, the experience is smooth and seamless. This puts more focus on relationships and enables recruiters to engage with candidates, build trust, and help candidates feel welcomed into your talent community.

Connecting candidates with your current employees, through Employee Resource Group (ERG) events and the like, can also help humanize the recruiting process and inspire candidates to envision themselves working at your organization. In fact, this is a vital part of the recruitment marketing strategy of many top employers today.

Virtual Recruiting Events Boost Engagement

Hosting virtual recruiting events can be a game-changer for employers—especially those with high-volume hiring needs and in industries with a talent shortage. To maximize the ROI of your virtual recruiting events, it’s essential to adopt proven best practices and analyze your results over time and make adjustments to get you even closer to your hiring goals.

In today's job market, a truly elevated recruitment marketing strategy is optimizing every part of the recruiting experience to wow candidates, speed up the process, and provide an amazing experience. Virtual recruiting events deliver all that, and more. 

Ready to learn how you can boost your recruitment marketing strategy with virtual recruiting events? Let's talk. 

Like this post? Try these!

• Everything You Need to Know About Recruitment Marketing

• Recruitment Marketing 101

• 5 Reasons Virtual Recruiting Events & Recruitment Marketing Work Better Together

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