Redefining Recruiting Events to Hire Gen Z

Recruiters have to reconsider not only where their ideal candidates may be found, but also how to best engage them in our more digitally integrated world.

The competition for the best talent is fierce, and companies that are willing to be creative stand a better chance of making the right impression. 

So what is a recruiting event? 

A recruiting event can be simply defined as a predetermined time and location where job seekers can meet with employers, and where recruiters can find and hire the brightest and most motivated talent to join their workforce. 

However, when considering campus recruiting, the definition of a recruiting event becomes more specific. Traditionally, recruiting events have taken the form of career fairs: large, organized gatherings taking place both on and off campus, hosted by campus career centers, groups of employers, or non-profit organizations like the National Society of Black Engineers. 

In the past, students were limited to the resources available within their school or local community, and recruiters were also limited to engaging only those candidates who were able to show up in person at a specific time and place. 

In more recent years, the definition of campus recruiting events has expanded. Virtual recruiting events became a common strategy, partly because candidates themselves were becoming more and more accustomed to looking for work and engaging with everything online. Recruiters also began to consider new ways of engaging with students, outside of large-scale career fairs. Networking sessions, coffee chats, and classroom visits are now common tactics that employers use.

So in a sense, many of the barriers for both candidates and recruiters have been eliminated. No longer are recruiters limited to a list of core schools, or geographic regions, or even their travel budgets. Tools like Yello help bring millions of qualified diverse candidates to your interview space in seconds, and these same candidates are using online tools like WayUp to find their dream jobs and preferred job searching experiences without leaving the comfort of their house. 

Why host a recruitment event? 

Recruitment events allow companies to meet with a large number of candidates in a short amount of time. Events also allow companies to better tell their story and to communicate their brand’s message by bringing it to life. Recruiters who keep candidate experience in mind will likely receive even more value from hosting or participating in events. 

So what types of recruiting events are happening now? And what types of events will have the best ROI for your company? Let’s dive into both questions now:

Let’s take a closer look at some of these in more detail, and also highlight how Yello’s tools can help with each of these, whether their in-person, online or hybrid. 

Career Fairs 

Career fairs (also known as job fairs or hiring fairs) are a convenient way to connect with a large volume of candidates in a specific place and at a specific time (in the case of virtual fairs). For early-talent, career fairs often occur on-campus. Career fairs allow companies to tell their story in a more tangible and personal way, and help employers build relationships with strategic partner schools.

Yello is purpose-built to help employers optimize their strategy and execution before, during, and after large-scale events like campus career fairs to increase conversion rates, create more efficiency and align financial resources with the most successful initiatives. One of the most powerful features Yello offers recruiters is event-based scheduling – leveraging automation to create a seamless high-volume interview experience. Your team can ditch the paper resumes which facilitates a smoother candidate experience, real time evaluations, and clear post-event ROI analytics. 

Diversity Events 

Diversity events and conferences allow organizations to increase their representation and meet DEI goals by engaging with a more diverse pool of candidates. Diversity events are often a cornerstone of an organization’s DEI hiring strategy and Yello can help at every stage, from planning to execution to measuring success and ROI.

Yello’s best-in-class event management tools allow employers to plan in-person campus & virtual events and engage with the right candidates that fit their target criteria. Yello’s Automated Concierge Sourcing allows organizations to virtually engage with qualified, diverse early-career candidates from across the United States in order to drive attendance to their in-person and virtual events. 

For planning your recruitment strategy, Yello’s Campus Diversity Insights dashboards help recruiters understand what schools have students that meet their target criteria, including major, grad year, DEI data and more. Reevaluate what you think you know about your core schools with comprehensive data from your top campuses and schools across the country.

Networking Sessions 

While large-scale hiring events are geared towards companies that are actively looking to fill open roles  and hire candidates at scale, networking events allow organizations to build up their talent pool for future opportunities and forge more personal connections with candidates. 

Yello’s purpose-built talent CRM allows recruiters to build a proactive talent repository that organizes, nurtures and grows relationships with candidates. Pinpoint ideal candidates and easily preview resumes to quickly scale your hiring volume. 

Coffee Chats 

Coffee chats are in-person or virtual events with a more relaxed and informal feel, reserved for your top prospective candidates. These events can help talent and team supervisors to get to know each other and develop a sense of what working together will be like. 

Yello’s Recruitment CRM allows recruiters to design a branded and memorable candidate experience while simplifying and centralizing your evaluation and the event scheduling (and re-scheduling) process. 

Only a purpose-built talent CRM like Yello’s can be fully customized to your organizations needs, complete with the industry’s best integration’s support team, all designed to get candidates from hello to hired! 

Resume Reviews

Resume reviews, workshops and feedback sessions are proactive methods of getting to know candidates before their interviews. They can help your team identify skills that match your current openings, as well as better prepare candidates for their interviews. Since resume reviews can be very helpful to candidates, they put a special spotlight on your brand’s efforts and leadership in nurturing early talent within your industry. 

Yello’s branding and candidate engagement tools allow recruiters to easily attract and connect with early talent who meet specific criteria, qualifications and backgrounds. Combine that with the industry leading power of WayUp’s database of over 7 million diverse candidates, recruiters are able to build and nurture relationships with talent from around the country. 

Hackathons/Competitive Events 

Competitive events and hackathons allow candidates to showcase their unique talents, and help employers connect with the most motivated and passionate job seekers. Hackathons specifically have helped many recruiters in the tech and SaaS industries nurture and hire top talent that have gone on to revolutionize organizations and products. 

Yello automates the manual work of planning and hosting recruiting events of all kinds including competitive events, making it easy to organize your strategy, invite candidates, manage pre-registration, and follow up to promote attendance. 

Candidates simply create their own profile by registering via a mobile application or with a QR code. Real-time evaluations help you identify which candidates move to the next stage.

Classroom Visit

Large organizations who need to build a high volume hiring pipeline understand the importance of nurturing talent even before the application process. By establishing your brand early, and helping students prepare for their job search, your organization has already made a positive impression that can make it easier to attract and hire the best candidates. 

Yello helps recruiters track everything! With industry-leading planning capabilities and end-to-end process visibility, sourcing reach, and events management, your team will have confidence in the value they’re driving to your business and will have the insights they need for measurable improvement.