LET’S face it: virtual career fairs are a pain. It may be tagged as the new normal in pandemic times, but there’s nothing “normal” about all that waiting around and all the disjointed conversations leading to nowhere.
We live in a time-strapped world, but recruitment strategies remain highly inefficient and archaic. Despite their cost-effectiveness and use of tech, virtual career fairs are also dinosaurs in (albeit, a clever) disguise.
Well, enough is enough. #noVCF
When we invented a platform for speed interviews, we knew this approach would not just be fun for those involved. It also has plenty of advantages for both recruiters and candidates. First pioneered in the nineties by law firms, an increasing number of recruiters from huge multinationals to small startups are now adopting it as part of their game plan.
But just how different are speed interviews from virtual career fairs? Here’s the 411 on what sets it apart:
1. Purpose
Virtual career fairs tend to be more employer branding events. Speed interviews focus on bringing more interview opportunities to the participants.
2. Highly targeted
Career fairs are for everyone, while speed interview events run for a highly targeted group of candidates. Employers will only meet with eligible candidates. For instance, we have recently hosted a speed interview-style career fair for the School of Computing (SoC) graduates at one of Asia’s top universities.
3. Speed
You only need 2 to 4 weeks to set up a virtual speed interview event. Our recent events (o-hosted with one of the Singapore local employment agencies) only took 1 week to set everything up, and more than 40 candidates participated in it. But it will take at least 8 weeks to set up a virtual career fair.
4. Levels the playing field
A speed interview event offers a fair opportunity for ALL candidates to meet with the employers and have an individual discussion. Virtual career fairs tend to run more group discussions that minimize the engagement between candidates and employers.
5. More efficient
Some candidates like to pre-schedule a meeting with the recruiting team at a virtual career fair. However, some candidates bail out at the last minute, thus wasting the time of the interviewer. For a speed interview, another candidate will automatically fill the empty slot to ensure that the recruiting team makes full use of the event hours.
One of our interviewers managed to complete 12 interviews consecutively without the need to schedule it back-and-forth with the candidates.