GCCA | Graduate Careers Council of Australia

Graduate Careers Australia

The Graduate Grapevine – Number 3, March 2006

Careers Fairs – Time to Grab that Opportunity

Careers Fair promotion is unlike any other kind of recruitment initiative. It’s intense, personal, occasionally overwhelming and always a learning experience. To ensure you make the most of your investment of time, people and money, it pays to prepare some specific strategies to bolster your success at the Fairs. So here are a few pointers.

Stand Out from the Crowd

Visitors to a Fair will decide within seconds if they’re going to stop at your display and they will make that decision without even speaking with you! So it’s worth taking some time to review the physical impression you make in a Fair environment – including the appearance of staff.

• Use colour – corporate or eye catching on walls, flooring and staff dress.
• Ensure staff are easily identified and distinct from the visitor.
• Make signage meaningful and visible; if your brand is not well known, use signage to advertise your point of difference, key benefit or product. Consider banners and flyers above eye level while being aware that a crowd on your stand could obstruct your message.
• Remove the barriers to facilitate a conversation. Barriers may include furniture, product, signage or people!

Consider what most other participants’ stands look like and do something different.

Wallflowers and Fisher(wo)men

Staffing a stand at a Careers Fair is not for everyone. The role requires a certain personality and a fundamental desire to engage with people. So rostering the retiring and shy personality, paralysed with anxiety, will not help. On the contrary, gathering a team of outgoing, informed and enthusiastic colleagues will make the difference between an OK Fair and a successful one.

Once your team is compiled, undertake to:

• meet prior to the Fair so that everyone knows who and what is involved
• clearly define the roles of each person prior, during and post-Fair
• encourage questions
• share the expected outcomes
• review the company’s graduate program so that the team has a consistent message
• formulate questions your people can ask to qualify visitors
• reiterate the need to listen to visitors
• discuss the attitude you wish to convey to visitors.

Remember, if staff don’t look like they want to be there, potential visitors are unlikely to approach your stand.

Identifying the Perfect Candidate

Given the volume of people visiting the Fairs, it is imperative that you have a clear profile of the person you wish to attract and engage on your stand. You certainly will be approached by candidates who are not prospective employees, so it is necessary to be proactive in your ‘recruitment’ behaviour on the stand.

Start by defining your preferred candidate with clear criteria, for example:

• qualifications – content and level achieved
• previous employment experience – type and duration
• timeframe/availability for commencing employment.

The more precise your criteria, the more qualified the candidates you intend following up post-Fair.

Potential Employee or Passer By?

The next challenge is working out if the woman in the red skirt walking down the aisle meets your profile – how will you know? Above all, don’t presuppose someone does or does not fit your profile until you’ve spoken with them; or rather, until you’ve asked the right questions.

This point of engagement is imperative – ask the right questions and you’ll quickly identify a visitor as meeting your preferred profile or not. And by the way, if they don’t meet your profile, wish them all the best and politely move on to the next prospect. It is worth remembering that your company has allocated a portion of its recruitment budget to secure qualified candidates from the Fair so spend time with likely prospects.

With your colleagues, create a list of questions which will elicit the information you require to identify the visitor as a potential candidate (based on your preferred candidate profile):

• What’s your reason for visiting the Fair?
• When do you expect to commence work?
• What are your expectations for your first year of employment?
• Describe for me what you think it would be like to work for our company?
• What has been of most interest to you at the Fair?
• How will you go about evaluating the various employers?
• What’s important to you in a job/career?

If you undertake simply to review your current practices in light of these points, you’re on the path to more satisfying results from your Careers Fair participation.