Spotlight Online for College Employment and Recruiting Professionals, July 22, 2009

Many organizations rely on career fairs to help them identify potential interns and new hires, and use the career fair as an opportunity to build their campus image and market their opportunities. How can you make the most of your career fair experience?

"For individual recruiters attending fairs, their job is to be the face of the organization, identify particular students to target for internship and entry-level opportunities, provide contact information, and explain the application process,” explains Julie Cunningham, president of The Cunningham Group.

However, as Mary Scott points out, employers should focus their efforts on meeting the needs of students, who primarily attend career fairs to learn about opportunities. Scott, president of the Scott Resource Group, has conducted research with students by way of surveys and focus groups for more than 15 years.

“I have been intrigued by the consistency in responses from [students] over that long a time horizon regarding their career fair expectations and experiences,” she says. “For example, because the primary reason that students attend career fairs is to learn about job opportunities, employers should focus their efforts on meeting those needs. Too often, the emphasis on employer branding supersedes communicating with students about positions and company culture, and career fair attendees leave the event without gathering much meaningful information.”

Furthermore, the extenuating circumstances surrounding the economy have made appearances more critical for organizations hiring and looking to brand themselves with college students.  

“We seem to be in a pattern, which surfaces during economic downturns, where many employers use the career fair as their only campus appearance,” Scott points out. “If this is their only ‘face time,’ this heightens the need for employers to interact with students in a way that is truly impressive.”

To make their mark on students and get the most out of their career fair participation, employers should “re-think every aspect of your approach, your booth, your message, and your participants.  Break the mold and do something that no one else is doing,” advises Sue Keever, owner of the Keever Group.

Some suggestions Keever offers are:

• Offer a five-minute massage to students who are obviously stressed out by the job-search process. 
  
  
• Offer a $15 Starbucks card for any student that comes to you booth wearing your company's logo. 
  
  
• Instead of offering giveaways, ask students to write down their favorite charity and conduct a drawing at regular intervals throughout the fair and announce the winning charity. Send a donation to their charity in their name and, of course, send them an acknowledgement. 

“All the while, you should do your best to get students’ contact information so that you can begin the dialogue—not just attempt to recruit them, but to ask their opinion, offer relevant advice, and more,” Keever adds.

The best way to impress students is with the people you send to the career fair to represent your organization.

“Without question, students want to interact with ‘real employees,’ ” Scott says. “This means line of business representatives, not HR staff. But the behavior of career fair reps is as important as their knowledge about the company and career opportunities. Make sure that everyone who staffs the booth clearly understands that students extrapolate about your company culture from such cues as the friendliness and enthusiasm of your representatives.”

Cunningham says the general wisdom for selecting representatives for career fairs is to choose alumni, at least some of whom are fairly recent grads; representatives from the same major/line of business as the students you're recruiting; someone from HR; and enough representatives so that students don't have to wait too long and your reps get a break now and then. She also recommends selecting people who are enthusiastic and outgoing, and who enjoy college students (surprisingly, she notes, not everyone does).

“You can't train an individual to be warm, personable, or interested,” Keever adds. “When selecting your team, identify those who have a passion for what they do and an interest in building relationships with students.”

In terms of training, Cunningham says career fair teams should be assembled and oriented at least several weeks prior to the events. 

“This gives them time to prepare—not just ingesting the information you give them about skill sets to look for, numbers, logistics, and more, but maybe they want to get together themselves and make plans to contact students ahead of time, or visit faculty while on campus, or do something special at the fair that takes planning ahead,” she explains.

For example, Cunningham suggested that one of her clients—a coal mining company—do something fun at their booth, like bring a miner's hardhat, pickaxe, big boots, and a flannel shirt, then take photos of students dressed up as miners.

“That kind of fun stuff attracts students, but takes some planning,” she says.

Cunningham also conducts mock career fairs with clients, dividing the group into "employers" and "students."  Each side has 20 minutes to prepare and then they hold a "career fair" for 30 minutes. 

“We do a readout at the end and talk about what happened,” she says. “The idea is that a run-through of an activity makes it more real to the participants and shows them where they need preparation.”

There are two key elements to effective career fair preparation, Scott says. First, employers need to think through and develop a method to communicate information about the specific positions that they intend to highlight; and then identify and train representatives who can speak to those positions in an informed and credible manner. Again, one of the keys to a successful career fair is meeting—and exceeding—student expectations.

"Students expect that employers will have identified positions prior to attending the career fair,” Scott notes. “They expect to be treated with respect during the event. This means no cell phone calls at the booth, and no 'blowing them off' [by sending them to] the employer’s web site. And they expect follow-up if the representatives have indicated that they’ll do so.”  

Proper preparation, Cunningham recommends, also includes identifying organizational goals for the career fair (such as identifying 12 students for campus interviews) and sharing them with recruiters, following the instructions of the sponsoring institution for deadlines and logistics, and attending to the details, i.e. making sure your booth will be there and that you have adequate materials.

And interwoven throughout your training should be a common thread of how your recruiters will deal with students. Will you have a high-touch approach? Or will you simply have your recruiters refer students to your web site to apply?

“This isn’t new, but it’s not going away either,” Scott says. “The practice of not accepting resumes, and telling students to apply online with no means of tagging the student as someone of interest is as toxic a practice as I’ve ever seen.  Students don’t understand why employers that use such an approach bother to attend the career fair—and they consider any interaction with these companies to have been a waste of their time.”

Cunningham agrees, saying that it’s clear to her that high touch beats high tech when you are asking people to make decisions about their careers and where they're going to live.  

“Students place a lot more value on ‘face time’ than on ‘Facebook’ when making these highly personal decisions,” she says. “Student survey results confirm this. A good recruiter uses all [available] tools, but also knows that at the end of the day, his or her personality and how he or she represents the organization to the candidate is what gets the hire.”

When it’s all boiled down, college recruiting is based on building relationships between an organization, its people, and college students looking for the perfect pad from which to launch their professional careers.

"Career fairs, if done properly, provide a perfect format for personal interaction and opening a dialogue that can last over the four years of a student's college experience,” Keever says. “It isn't about brochures, videos, and giveaways…it's about putting a face with the name and building a long-term relationship."