Online Career Fairs – the Staffordshire experience
In January 2007 Staffordshire University began development of a software system that enables it to set up and manage online career fairs. The intention, as with all fairs, was to bring exhibitors and graduates together at the same place and to facilitate meaningful dialogues between them. Mark Kent, Head of Careers and Employability Service, describes how it works.
The reasons for going online were pragmatic: the university doesn't have lots of large employers nearby that might attend a physical fair and we can't easily attract employers from further afield. Also local, smaller employers have limited time and resources to attend physical fairs and for this reason are difficult to attract. Online fairs would potentially enable employers to engage with our fairs at a distance and allow them to slot these engagements around their busy schedules.
Staffordshire University is based on several sites and so locating a fair at one would disadvantage the others. An online approach therefore also offers advantages of accessibility for graduates and in particular for disabled graduates.
Our fairs work as follows: we set up a fair in our administrator function, with header and footer graphics and opening and closing dates. We then make it visible before the ‘opening' date and take pre-registrations of graduates and exhibitors and their vacancies. Exhibitors submit their details with their logos and vacancies for us to approve. Once they are approved they are published to the site. Fairs are free to exhibitors, who can choose to pay to have their logos prominently displayed on the front page as ‘sponsors'. In this way we can generate income from exhibitors without restricting take-up.
At this stage graduates can create their accounts and browse exhibitor details but can't communicate with them. On the opening date this communication channel is opened and graduates can pose questions. Automated e-mails notify exhibitors of waiting questions and graduates of their replies. Each then log into their accounts to read communications and make replies. At any stage graduates can upload their CVs to exhibitors. Communication is asynchronous rather than ‘live chat' so that exhibitors aren't tied to being by their computers at specific times.
The intention of our approach is to showcase exhibitors and to allow searchability by employment sector, location and occupation type. Once graduates have identified employers and vacancies of interest, they can then enter one-to-one dialogues and upload CVs to chosen employers. By opening fairs for one month, time is made available for these dialogues to take place. We have been able to monitor online conversations between exhibitors and graduates and have seen arrangements for interviews taking place.
Funding for our first fair (25 June - 20 July) was specifically targeted at graduate retention in Staffordshire. This restricted us to working with exhibitors in Staffordshire but allowed us to look to the future and to develop software that was generic and could be used to set up fairs with other target groups in mind; for example we plan to run a national fair in November.
We marketed the Staffordshire fair to exhibitors via our local Chambers of Commerce, employer networks, via mail shots and the local press. We were surprised only to register 30 exhibitors from this activity. We managed to register over 400 graduates from 65 universities and felt that this was a reasonable number considering the limited geographical coverage. Overall the level of activity helped to prove that the concept worked, although at the time of writing we have yet to evaluate exhibitors' and graduates' perceptions of the fair.
Our approach seems capable of delivering a viable version of a fair, in that it brings exhibitors and graduates together at the same place and facilitates meaningful dialogues between them. It enables exhibitors and graduates to use their time efficiently, and increases accessibility. Now that the system is set up new fairs are easy to generate and to populate, and the workload involved for the service is reduced and spread over a longer time compared to a physical fair. These features make it a powerful tool that we are keen to exploit.
The following link gives more information:
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/careers/fair
Phoenix Inclusion: Autumn, 2007
Tags: fair careers fair graduate recruitment fair recruitment fair
Created on: 13 November 2007
Last updated: 08 February 2008