Increase Campus Recruiting Event Attendance at Your Booth

Attracting top talent to your booth at campus recruiting events is critical for sourcing great candidates. With so many companies competing for students’ attention, it can be challenging to stand out. By focusing on promotion strategies, communication tactics, and booth set up, you can increase candidate engagement at your next campus event.

Leverage Text Messaging

Collect student cell numbers via a QR code with a landing page to send SMS reminders about your booth location, openings and follow ups after the event as part of your ongoing candidate engagement and campus recruitment strategy. Texting drives up interest and makes communication convenient without the hassle of phone tag. Use texts to convey event logistics, advertise any special perks or activities at your booth, answer quick questions, and provide easy next steps post-fair.

Promote Across Multiple Channels

Career services teams can be great partners for companies aiming to increase campus recruitment. By collaborating directly with career services, employers can connect with professors to reach students with relevant skills and interests. In return, career services gain visibility into which roles and majors students are being interviewed and hired for after events. Schools want to gain insights to continually refine curriculum based on hiring trends and feedback. However, schools can’t get this helpful hiring data without communicating directly with organizers or leveraging a third party like Yello. So it is crucial to build these partnerships to support campus recruitment efforts.

Also, leveraging social media, campus TV monitors, emails, print flyers, and event listings to widely promote that your company is attending as part of your campus recruitment strategy. Share fun facts, employee testimonials, internship opportunities, and application deadlines to generate interest in your roles and event presence. Campus recruitment success starts with getting the word out far and wide about your upcoming participation. You can also offer to provide content or quotes for school publications and blogs to gain additional exposure.

Send Personalized Emails

Email students directly, highlighting open positions that match their major and customizing each message. This level of personalization in your candidate sourcing strategies makes students feel valued right from the initial outreach. If a student replies, follow up with next steps and details on how to apply or sign up for more information at your booth as an additional touchpoint for your candidates. Use emails as a way to establish direct contact with relevant students to convey you see them as a good fit and are interested in them specifically.

Implement a Robust Recruiting CRM

A quality CRM platform designed specifically for candidate sourcing strategies can provide structure and efficiency to campus recruiting efforts. The right talent CRM centralizes candidate communication, enables automated email and text campaigns for personalized outreach, schedules interviews, and tracks data to optimize talent sourcing strategies. This consolidates all the critical tools into one system in an efficient way so campus recruiting teams can compete against companies with larger recruiting teams at their disposal. When the process aligns with technology specialized for your early talent requirements, it becomes far easier to deliver an excellent candidate experience that top talent has come to expect during the recruitment journey.

Partner with Student Groups

Connect with related academic clubs, fraternities/sororities, and diversity organizations to spread the word that you’ll be attending the career fair as part of your campus recruitment and candidate sourcing strategies. Offer to give a short presentation about your company culture, internship program, and open opportunities to build interest and candidate engagement on the front end. Provide flyers, signage, and promotional items for them to help promote your booth presence to their members. Strategic partnerships lead to expanded reach and more candidates visiting your booth at the event.

Offer On-Site Resume Reviews

Entice attendees by widely promoting free, on-the-spot resume reviews available at your booth during the campus event. This unique offering is a great candidate engagement tactic that draws in students who are open to new opportunities and desire valuable feedback from recruiting experts on how they can improve their resumes to be more competitive applicants. During the review, emphasize benefits and development opportunities that appeal to student’s interests and priorities to get them invested in applying. 

Consider offering free resume reviews year-round through a simple signup form on your careers page. This provides helpful career assistance to students while supplying their contact information to engage them about upcoming events and roles. It’s also a great way to bring active students into your CRM or marketing system for future communication about open roles and events throughout the year. This enables you to continue targeted messaging throughout the year to re-engage those students after they have expressed interest by signing up and taking the time for a resume review.

Host Employer Webinars

Consider hosting freely accessible webinars to position your company as a thought leader while collecting leads as part of your candidate sourcing strategies. You can check out this blog for more best practices on hosting a webinar for candidates. By creating a careers site landing page for students to sign up, you can provide their contact info and interests to integrate into your ATS. Deliver value by covering relevant topics like job hunting tips, what to expect during recruiting, or skills overviews for sought-after roles. The goal is to educate students about your open positions and brand while offering them something useful in return for their contact information to support future outreach efforts related to campus recruiting. Webinars enable expanded reach and two-way virtual interactions with prospective candidates.

Craft an Award-Worthy Booth Presence

Your campus event booth should feel like a professional stage for showcasing your employer brand and sparking conversations. If your organization doesn’t have the brand recognition of the Googles and Nikes of the world, you’ll need more inviting booths. Consider visual displays that reflect your mission through images and eye-catching color schemes. Have ample company information on hand to provide and initiate discussions. Position recruiters to actively engage visitors with a friendly and assertive approach. Promotional giveaways also make great icebreakers to attract student interest. This can be done by promoting fun contests or games that encourage participation. 

Remember, first impressions stick so show energy and expertise. Convey your authentic culture while distributing relevant job and company details that resonate with student priorities. All these factors at your campus event booth combine to form the candidate experience. Focus on quality interactions over quantity by making prospects feel welcomed and valued. An exceptional booth fuels your campus recruitment goals by making early talent eager to apply.

Choose Yello for Your Campus Recruiting Event Software

Most HR tech isn’t built with early talent and campus recruiting in mind – that’s where Yello comes in. Yello provides a platform tailored specifically to campus teams’ needs, with best-in-class tools for event planning, candidate sourcing strategies and engagement across channels, and streamlined recruitment operations.

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