Virtual career fair technology is one of the most powerful tools for connecting employers and job seekers on the market today. Whether you are looking for a solution to host virtual career fairs, to manage your in-person career fairs, or for all of your hiring event needs, we’ve got you covered in this roundup of the best virtual career fair technology on the market in 2024.
What to Look for in a Virtual Career Fair Solution
The use of virtual career fair technology has exploded and today, there are a lot of online solutions to choose from to manage your virtual and in-person hiring events. But it’s important to keep in mind that what they provide to employers, candidates and event managers all differs widely. When it comes to virtual career fair technology, the options available vary greatly in terms of features and capabilities. The most reputable technology out there is designed specifically for hosting virtual hiring events with hundreds of candidates within a matter of hours. Not all tools on the market offer the same level of convenience and scalability. Chances are, you’ve had the opportunity to participate in a virtual career fair in some capacity. But when it comes to choosing a solution for your organization, it can feel overwhelming to search for a technology that meets your needs. Here are some criteria to keep in mind as you learn about your options.
- How much experience does this vendor have?
- What kind of security protocols help protect user data?
- How would the vendor respond to a data breach?
- What specific services does this vendor offer?
- What level of customer support is available?
- What kind of training is offered prior to the virtual job fair?
- What devices are supported for accessing the technology?
- Does the technology support video live streaming?
- What level of customization is offered?
- Is there a custom registration form you can personalize for each event?
- What are the tracking capabilities?
- Do you get access to candidate data and resumes?
- What are the reporting capabilities?
#1 Radancy’s Hiring Events
Radancy is now the most experienced vendor in the world of virtual career fairs after acquiring Brazen in 2023. Rated the #1 virtual event management software by Capterra users, this hiring events technology also offers in-person event management, so you can streamline the process for recruiters and candidates alike, and access all your event data from a single platform. Unlike many other solutions, Radancy’s technology was built specifically with hiring events in mind, so it offers a wide range of capabilities specific to the task, making it best in class for talent acquisition teams.
Radancy’s Hiring Events offers a wide range of recruiting tools and features, including the leading career fair technology. With this technology, organizations can easily connect with job seekers in a variety of ways, including both single-company virtual hiring events and multi-company virtual career fairs that equip hiring teams to easily rate their conversations with candidates and follow up with them, all from one AI-powered platform. Radancy’s Hiring Events also offers a Customer Success Manager to help you with your hiring event strategy and shares a wealth of tools and resources dedicated to helping talent acquisition teams.
Customers use this solution across a range of talent acquisition programs, from campus recruiting to high-volume hiring and beyond.
Building Your 2024 Hiring Event Playbook with Radancy’s Hiring Events
Radancy’s Hiring Events offers a wide range of valuable recruiting tools, including video interviewing, live video broadcasts, video, audio and text chat, configurable booths and candidate chat scheduling; group video booths and networking lounges; branding and configurable registration forms; candidate communication tools, including chatbots, email and automation features; event promotion tools and services; interactive tools including microsites and live chat built specifically for recruiting teams; native and custom API and third-party integrations as well as calendar integrations; robust tracking, analytics and dashboards giving you real-time access to event performance data as well as candidate information; and, the ability to create templates and event series to save your team time and scale your hiring event strategy easily. Every aspect of the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud, including the event technology, is built to help you accelerate the hiring process while also improving the candidate experience.
Teams can configure their event registration pages, including data fields on the online registration form, plus enable the ability to require attendees to meet minimum qualifications prior to full registration. Plus, users have the support of a Customer Success team as well as a user resource academy and access to live support, a level of service many on this list do not provide. And Radancy’s Hiring Events are easily accessible both from desktop and mobile devices, without the need to download extra apps.
Radancy’s Hiring Events also helps employers reach their desired target audience with sourcing solutions that go beyond simply advertising job openings on career sites. The Radancy hiring events technology helps drive qualified candidates to your hiring events, so you can hire more top talent, faster. Plus, with the power of a single platform, the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud enables customers to access a suite of tools to hire the right candidates, simplify talent acquisition and maximize ROI.
Radancy’s Hiring Events also powers in-person hiring events, so you can manage all your recruiting events from one place and centralize candidate ratings, data and follow up across both virtual and in-person recruiting events.
Radancy’s Hiring Events Reviews
Radancy’s Hiring Events is consistently recognized as a top vendor in the virtual event space by Capterra, G2 and Select Software, based on customer reviews. Radancy’s Hiring Events deeply understands the challenges of employers looking to hire qualified candidates in this virtual world or universities looking to help their graduating students find that next best career. Companies like Spectrum, CVS Health, Northrop Grumman and Walgreens and top Universities like USC, NYU, Temple, Carnegie Mellon and many more host virtual career fairs regularly with the Hiring Events technology, and users report that the tools are “very easy to use and user friendly.”
In other reviews, users tout the cost and time savings in their hiring process, the ongoing feature enhancements and the candidate management system and access to data as outpacing the competition.
“If you’re looking for a virtual event management technology, this is it! The features and on-going enhancements are second to none. I recommend this technology to anyone looking to host virtual events. The candidate management system is fantastic and gathers all the information you need.” – Jessica P, Capterra User
“The registration, website integration and registration processes far outpace its competition. The one-on-one scheduling is especially appreciated by our exhibitors, making our event all the more enticing for them vs. our competitors.” – Denise M on Capterra
Radancy’s Hiring Events enables customers to set up virtual career fairs and in-person hiring events at their chosen date and time, tailoring events to candidates with certain skillsets, job functions, industries, locations and more, in order to hire the best talent and hit hiring goals. This flexible service makes it easy for recruiters to focus on their biggest sourcing challenges. For example, one reviewer on Capterra reports using Radancy to host virtual career fairs to reach candidates with active security clearance to work in the Department of Defense space.
Other companies use Radancy to find candidates for management-level positions or warehouse and logistics staff. Employers promote online career fairs via social media and email lists, and recruiters can use the technology’s communication tools to invite past applicants.
Radancy’s Hiring Events offers video interviewing and live video broadcasts right from its own technology. No external solutions or third-party tools are necessary, unlike many other solutions. It also gives recruiting teams direct access to all candidate data and has integrated candidate management tools to equip teams to easily rate, follow up with and communicate with talent.
With top-notch customer service and a constant push to innovate, Radancy’s Hiring Events is one of the best virtual career fair technology options available for recruitment teams.
#2 Hopin
Founded in 2019, this London-based company describes itself as a virtual venue for live online events. It falls short of being a conversational recruiting solution and lacks some of the advanced features of more established virtual event offerings, such as the ability to gain insights on guest profiles while in a chat or prioritize and queue attendees throughout an event. Hopin offers a variety of areas within a single event – the Reception, Stage, Sessions, Networking and Expo area – each with the ability to host customized content. For some users, the experience can be overwhelming or confusing.
Hopin is a more general-purpose virtual event technology and is not built specifically for the hiring or recruiting process. Hopin may be used for a variety of events, including conferences, trade shows and webinars. It offers features ranging from live streaming to chat, Q&A and breakout rooms, but it lacks candidate management tools and features tailored to the needs of talent acquisition teams.
#3 Handshake
Handshake is a talent marketplace built for connecting students and recent graduates to employers through its website. This vendor launched an online job fair offering in response to the pandemic and their career fairs are designed to help student job seekers learn more about potential employers through group meetings and 1:1 chats. Handshake touts access to more than 10 million students and alumni. The technology has mostly mixed user reviews, with criticisms centering around communication, ease of use, visual appeal and lacking employer branding options. If you are looking for technology that is specifically designed for early-career professionals, Handshake is a good option; however, if you are looking for a single solution that helps you reach all levels of professionals, you may want to consider a solution that equips you to engage more types of talent and helps you build your own talent pool.
#4 Premier Virtual
According to their website, Premier Virtual is a multi-functional software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology designed to bridge the gap between technology and human interaction. They mention that they work with employers and universities in industries including education, workforce development, healthcare and the military. Premier Virtual does offer something many vendors on this list do not: a dedicated client success manager to help customers navigate the event setup process.
User reviews noted that this technology is not as customizable as many other options, so if you want to customize the look and feel, have more video options, or need the ability to upload custom content such as videos, images or documents, you may want to consider a different option. Reviewers also noted event analytics were limited and that the technology was not very user friendly.
#5 Indeed
Indeed is a popular job search website that recently launched a virtual career fair offering for employers. While it offers a large user base of potential candidates to reach and targets all levels of professionals, it offers limited features and lacks the ability to customize the solution to fit your specific needs. You cannot track the performance of your virtual career fair and you will not get access to details such as a candidate’s name, email address and resume, until after the career fair, so you are limited in your ability to prepare your recruiting team or communicate with attendees prior to an event. In addition, while you can adjust a few registration questions, you cannot add custom fields as you can with more robust, purpose-built virtual career fair technology.
While you can send email blasts to those registered for your event, you cannot send individual messages to candidates or leverage automation tools based on custom registration data like you can with the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud.
#6 vFairs
vFairs has a 3D environment-based virtual events offering for companies to host a variety of online events including training, trade shows, expos and career fairs. vFairs is a software provider that allows company recruiters to host custom events specifically for their company.
The downside? Because of the wide variety of event options vFairs offers for their virtual experience, and the 3D nature of the virtual environment, recruiters and candidates may be overwhelmed or distracted by irrelevant features during the interactive event. vFairs also lacks a robust set of talent acquisition-specific features that are purpose-built to help recruiting teams take action on candidates directly from the solution before or after an event.
#7 CareerEco
CareerEco hosts a variety of online event experiences, including virtual career fairs as well as online events for universities to connect prospective graduate students and alumni with employers, graduate schools and other professional organizations. Customers include a variety of academic institutions and organizations focused on helping students and recent graduates launch their careers. CareerEco’s features are not as robust as many others on this list, including limited registration customization, limited branding opportunities and lacking the ability to customize communication to specific candidates from the offering.
CareerEco promotes the environmental friendliness of virtual career fair and job fair events compared to physical ones and emphasizes their benefits in terms of time and money saved. It is a selling point which is applicable to all virtual event companies. For high-volume talent acquisition teams outside of academia or other educational institutions, CareerEco is probably not a good fit.
#8 Easy Virtual Fair
Easy Virtual Fair offers virtual career fair solutions for SMBs, universities and government organizations. They have a mobile-friendly technology and the service is focused on connecting company recruiters with candidates who are “on the go.” The technology is built on a 3D model and has limited recruiting features and customization options compared to others on this list but can be a good option for smaller businesses less concerned with scalability and customization. There aren’t many user reviews available for Easy Virtual Fair but most focus on the video chat options and customer service.
Event hosts can also customize virtual events with their own branding and unlimited booths to tailor the candidate experience. Easy Virtual Fair offers reporting capabilities but appears to lack integrated custom communication and recruiting tools outside of virtual career fair events.
#9 6Connex
6Connex is a virtual event offering that offers event organizers and sales and marketing teams services such as virtual trade shows, virtual career fairs, virtual summits and e-learning programs. This vendor can provide tools to create virtual events that replace in-person conferences, host hybrid events, or facilitate professional development for existing employees.
Using 6Connex for talent acquisition is just one of the many use cases this solution touts. Employers may prefer a recruiting software solution dedicated to the purpose of talent acquisition that has developed key features and tools necessary to recruit top talent and provide an exceptional candidate experience.
#10 XOR
Another solution born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, XOR focuses on helping businesses hire blue-collar and hourly workers. The XOR virtual career fair offering is available for one or many employers and offers some features similar to more robust hiring event offerings, including live chat and video. XOR offers fully automated talent sourcing, candidate screening and interview scheduling. Today’s job seekers demand and deserve a personalized candidate experience and often complain about a purely scripted recruiting process that lacks human connection. Reviewers noted that the chatbot library “isn’t terribly vast and it was not giving proper responses, but was fixed with some different scripting solutions.”
Pros & Cons of Other Solutions
Some offerings were built for general virtual event management and not expressly designed for recruiters, or for limited purposes such as video conversations – yet some TA teams are using those solutions to host virtual career fairs, with mixed results. Here’s a look at some of those solutions.
# 11 eCareer Fairs
The eCareer Fairs website includes very little information about their solution. The handful of customer testimonials are all from small companies. According to the site, their offering includes online candidate registration, recruitment marketing services, unlimited virtual event booths, one-on-one meetings with chat or video and event metrics. While the technology seems to offer the basic structure for virtual interviewing, we’d hesitate to call this a true virtual career fair solution, since it lacks live streaming capabilities, group video and some of the other key features that help employers host engaging, immersive virtual recruiting events and integrated communication and automation features.
#12 Career Fair Plus
Career Fair Plus is another vendor that offers a virtual interviewing solution rather than true virtual career fair technology. Career Fair Plus offers one-on-one and group video chats with customizable timeslots, virtual booths with recorded video candidate profiles and analytics. There isn’t much information on its website about the solution – nearly every product page dead-ends with a contact form. We’d like to see more about Career Fair Plus’s features, including event screenshots and videos, to learn more about how this option stacks up against others on the list.
#13 Zoom
Zoom saw a huge influx of users during the pandemic as it became one of the most popular ways to stay connected with friends and family while physical events were discouraged and social distancing was the norm. While Zoom wasn’t designed as a virtual career fair offering, many recruiters rely on the video conferencing tool to communicate with prospective employees. However, beyond conducting video interviews with already screened and qualified candidates, Zoom is not built to manage the process of efficiently screening, interviewing and hiring at the scale of a true virtual career fair solution. With Zoom, it’s not possible to manage scheduling and conducting interviews with multiple candidates at one time, or to manage candidate data like registration and qualification information, resume uploads, recruiter rating and candidate communication. Currently, Zoom does not offer features that directly support hosting a virtual career fair and there are no built-in features to track event performance. While Zoom is a good option for one-to-one or group video conversations, which can be used as a part of the recruiting process, it is not a good fit for organizations wishing to host virtual career fairs.
Virtual Career Fair Platform Features
What are the features you should be looking for when you select a hiring event solution? Here’s a look at some of the key features for talent acquisition teams:
Multiple-device accessibility: A virtual career fair offering has to have an easy to use, mobile-friendly candidate experience. Look for a solution that candidates can access from their desktop or mobile device, without any additional software downloads required.
Live chat: An ideal virtual career fair solution equips you to chat with candidates via text, audio and video based on each chat session.
Video interviewing: A robust virtual career fair offering enables you to screen and interview candidates directly with no additional third-party integrations needed, all native within the application – and equipped for multiple device types, including desktop and mobile video interviewing.
Video broadcasting: With a video broadcast feature, you’ll be able to present to all candidates simultaneously in a live presentation. Ideally, there’s a broadcast chat discussion feed, the ability for many presenters to participate and broadcast recording features as well.
Interview scheduling: With native interview scheduling, a virtual career fair offering will allow you to schedule conversations with candidates prior to a career fair event so that you can ensure your team is prioritizing conversations with top candidates. You can also use these for recruiter screening calls and hiring manager interviews – all within one recruiting event.
Event promotion tools: Recruiting event promotion tools like event tracking links, configurable landing pages, job requisition plug-ins and a sourcing marketplace that enables you to drive targeted job seekers to your hiring events help you get the right candidates to your hiring events.
Branded experiences: A virtual career fair solution with its own content management system will enable you to configure an event brand and experience. You want to look for a solution that allows you to share welcome videos, downloadable content, booth-hosted content and more so that you can provide candidates with the most relevant information about your organization – all with your own unique branding and messaging. It’s also important to consider the customization capabilities of the event landing page.
Configurable booths and event lobby: With a true virtual career fair solution, you’ll find a host of key features that set them apart from free video conferencing tools that create a better candidate experience. For example, an event lobby welcomes candidates, shares information and is easy to navigate. Booths that are configurable to each employer, department, team, or factors that employers wish to feature create an engaging candidate experience.
Follow-up features: A great virtual career fair offering does more than simply host the event; it enables your team to quickly follow up with top candidates and move them on to the next steps. Look for calendar integrations, email and follow-up capabilities and more. This is an important area where the right solution can really boost your return on investment, so don’t overlook this feature set.
Access to your own data: Many solutions on this list, especially talent marketplaces, do not provide you with candidate data until after an event, or they will charge you a per-candidate rate to access it. With the integration of Hiring Events across the end-to-end Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud, you own and can access data directly from the platform.
Analytics and reporting: Look for your virtual career fair solution of choice to provide analytics on key areas like attendance rates, chat data, sign-ups, ratings and more. It’s also important that key features such as tracking links and customizable registration fields are available to enable deeper analytics capabilities. Also, consider whether or not you get access to real-time insights before and after each event, including attendee lists, resumes and more, because not all solutions will provide you with this.
Candidate screening tools: Save valuable recruiter time with customizable registration forms that enable your team to move some candidates forward to attend the event and equip you to follow up with unqualified candidates about opportunities that better align with their experience and skills.
Customer support: With so many different types of users participating in virtual career fairs – from candidates to recruiters to employers to hiring managers – it’s critical to have a robust support team that is skilled in helping every type of user with their needs. Make sure that live support will be available during events via online chat or phone.
You may be wondering which solutions check all of the boxes and the answer is that very few do. Radancy’s in-person and virtual career fair technology offers all of these features, plus the connected intelligence of a single, AI-powered talent acquisition platform to help you find the right candidates and simplify your talent acquisition to maximize ROI.
Virtual Career Fairs Technology: The Key to Virtual Recruiting
When building a strategy for using virtual recruiting events, hybrid events and in-person career fairs, talent acquisition professionals and universities need to partner with a technology vendor that understands today’s challenges and has been around for the long haul. Finding a vendor that comprehends the TA ecosphere and recruiting process in a holistic way, beyond the immediate goals of sourcing and hiring, can be a challenge. By comparing vendor services in the context of the demands of the hiring process, talent acquisition leaders and company representatives can make informed decisions about where to invest in a virtual career fair technology that can ultimately save time and money and improve both the candidate and recruiter experience.
Still not convinced virtual career fair software fits into your recruiting and talent pool-building strategy? Read more in this post about how online career events and hiring fairs will save your company a lot of time and money.
Frequently Asked Questions: Virtual Career Fair Technology.
What is virtual career fair technology?
What exactly is virtual career fair technology or virtual hiring event technology? A virtual career fair is a type of online recruiting event that helps recruiters and hiring managers interact with job seekers at various stages of the candidate journey. These events are one component of an effective virtual recruitment strategy. Virtual hiring event technology is a tool designed specifically for this purpose.
How much does virtual job fair technology cost?
The price of a virtual career fair solution will vary depending on a few different factors: how often will you be hosting a virtual career fair, how many candidates will likely attend, how many employers or people on your team will there need to be to manage the event and engage with candidates and what is the size of your organization. Plus, the price of virtual job fair technology will vary vendor by vendor.
Let’s start with some basics:
Larger corporations often have larger hiring needs and will likely benefit greatly from a virtual career fair solution. These organizations will likely be hosting multiple events across the year and need dozens or hundreds of user seats for their recruiting team to be able to get access to the virtual career fair solution, which is an important factor in the overall price. However, considering the time technology like this can save recruiting teams, using a solution built specifically for virtual career fairs usually represents a significant savings in both time and money, resulting in a positive return. A new factor to consider is whether your virtual career fair technology will help you manage both virtual an in-person events – using one solution for both use cases will help you consolidate costs.
Small- and medium-size businesses likely have fewer open roles and smaller recruiting teams, meaning the factors that go into the cost of virtual career fair technology will result in a lower overall cost for a virtual career fair solution.
Are there free virtual career fair technology options?
Several tools out there like Zoom, Teams or Webex may appear to be cheap or even “free” options since you may already have access to these tools within your organization. However, buyer beware! There are often hidden costs associated with these tools. Unlike some of the more established virtual career fair technology options in the space (like Radancy’s Hiring Events), these “free” tools require considerable management and investment of time outside of the offering.
Just because you can conduct a video interview with a candidate one-on-one via Zoom does not mean that it is a good option for hosting a virtual hiring event. It is difficult if not impossible to scale these tools to make them viable for screening and interviewing dozens or hundreds of candidates within a matter of hours, whereas virtual career fair technology like Radancy’s Hiring Events has been built specifically to make this entire process easy, intuitive and efficient for everyone involved – from candidates to recruiters to hiring managers. Imagine being able to conveniently direct hundreds of candidates to sign up for one hiring event at a specific time and easily coordinate conversations, pre-schedule interviews – and be able to offer information, live presentations and more to candidates, all at the same time. Similarly, using a standalone video tool means that interview scheduling, follow up and candidate rating all has to be managed manually. In short, you can use other tools to conduct video calls with candidates. But free tools will cost significant investment of time, additional tools and resources – and likely won’t offer the same results as a tool that has been designed specifically for TA teams to screen, coordinate hiring manager interviews, rate and follow up with candidates within a matter of hours.
These “free” tools are severely limited in their capabilities. Proceed with them at your own risk.
What are the benefits of virtual career fairs?
Here are seven key benefits of virtual career fairs that make them an ideal choice for connecting with top talent.
- Easy Access: Overcoming geographical barriers, candidates can participate from anywhere, broadening the talent pool.
- Cost Savings: Virtual events significantly reduce costs, eliminating venue fees and travel expenses and minimizing staffing requirements.
- Time Savings: Setup is swift, taking less than an hour, compared to the weeks or months required for traditional in-person career fairs.
- More Connections: The online format enables simultaneous private conversations, facilitating multiple connections at once.
- Easily Track ROI: Virtual solutions simplify tracking the return on investment, allowing real-time evaluation of candidate quality.
- Improved Recruitment Marketing: Targeting specific candidates is more efficient, resulting in a commendable attendance rate.
- Configurability: Modify the virtual career fair experience to align with the preferences of targeted job seekers through personalized content.
- Connected Data: Leverage data across the entire candidate journey on a single platform.
Virtual career fairs have emerged as a streamlined and effective solution for modern recruiting teams, offering efficiency, cost-effectiveness and a personalized approach to connecting with top talent.
- 12 Best Virtual Career Fair Technology & What to Look For - February 15, 2024
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