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Making the Most of Your Cleared Job Fair Resource Investment

In the marketing world leveraging your marketing assets is essentially called “activation.” When you purchase a marketing asset, it is the role of the purchaser to activate or leverage this asset. Many companies don’t execute this well and believe that they have paid a sponsorship or an event registration like a job fair registration, and things just happen.

That is one way to look at.

Or you can make the most of your investment.

An event registration is an investment in your brand marketing. How you participate at the event, how your booth looks, and how you engage those who come to your booth says a lot about your company and brand. The same is true for job fairs.

In addition to meeting with job seekers at a job fair, your participation shows the cleared ommunity that you want to engage with them. Companies rarely have an opportunity to put a face on their business. True there is advertising, but when you are looking to hire talent, they want to interact and engage with your brand ambassadors, aka your recruiters. We as people want to connect with people, yet most of the hiring process is online. Job fairs, especially in a tight job market, allow cleared job seekers the opportunity to get to know your company through recruiter interaction.

So what are some of the things you can do to leverage your Cleared Job Fair participation?

Key tips:

1. Promote your participation in the job fair. Use your company’s communication tools – email, web site, social media – to promote your attendance prior to the event.
2. Brand your booth. A tablecloth and banner or display announce to your potential hires that you are an established, stable organization and builds your brand in the eye of the job seeker.
3. Be welcoming. Stand in front of your table and welcome anyone who approaches your booth. Too often recruiters or hiring managers sit behind their exhibit tables. This approach engages rather than building a wall between you and your audience.
4. Think about your giveaways. Many companies invest in a lot of schwag — cups, pens or scrunchy balls. This can be an intense resource investment. What is the one thing your audience is going to use and remember?
5. Provide handouts. Beyond schwag, how can the job seeker follow up with you? Many companies have lists of hot jobs or business cards with email addresses, websites and social media links.
6. Look your best. Remember those first impressions you tell job seekers when they are coming to interview? Well the same holds true for when a job seeker comes to your booth. Nice attire or even matching shirts. This goes a long way in showing the audience that you are proud to work for the company.

What else can you do? Engage in social media during the job fair. Be sure to follow @ClearedJobsNet as we promote your attendance ahead of time on Twitter and on Facebook. Post pictures of your team at the event on several forms of social media.

Finally, send thank you notes. Just a follow up to your attendees to let them know you appreciate their time and would like to keep in touch. You may be competing with several other companies for the most talented job seekers, so remember thank yous are a two-way street as well.

What is this all worth? In the end the job seekers you engage at a Cleared Job Fair will share with their community the interactions they had with you at the event and afterwards. This word-of-mouth marketing, according to the experts, is the most valuable marketing you can do.

At the end of the day, if you activate or leverage your job fair participation you are not only seeing great candidates, leveraging your brand, but also participating in some of the most effective brand engagement possible.