Recruitment events have traditionally been a great way to find and engage top candidates. However, they’re not without their challenges. At large career fairs, you may speak to hundreds of students in one day. It can be difficult to keep track of which ones stood out, and even more challenging to follow up with them afterwards. Self-hosted virtual events are a good way to target specific groups with hyper-relevant content, but marketing the events and getting RSVPs is easier said than done.
Keeping track of different spreadsheets, using mail merges to follow up with attendees, and hoping you can keep in touch with just a small percentage of candidates who attend your events is not ideal. It’s not until you can tie all of your event efforts together, from marketing, to analytics, to follow-up, that you start to see a significant return on investment. With RippleMatch Events, you can do all of this and more—all while freeing up your time to focus on the candidates themselves.
Learn more about how to execute a successful recruitment events strategy via our guide, "100 Events & How to Do Them."
Benefits of Recruitment Events
Recruitment events are a critical component of any campus recruitment strategy. They allow you to meet and engage with top candidates, helping them learn and get excited about your company. Events can also be a great way to educate candidates about the opportunities your company offers and the benefits of starting their career in your industry. Recruiting events are also ideal for Early ID programs, helping you identify and nurture top talent months or even years before they’ll begin applying for jobs.
How RippleMatch Makes Marketing Your Events Painless
One of the most challenging aspects of hosting an event is ensuring that you have enough attendees. With RippleMatch, it’s easy to find great talent to attend your events. First, you can create an attractive landing page for each event, or series of events, with all of the relevant information candidates would need to know. You can then use that landing page to promote your event. Students can even RSVP directly on the page.
What really sets RippleMatch apart, is the ability to source attendees from the platform’s talent network of over 1 million students from more than 1,300 colleges and universities across the country. RippleMatch allows you to effortlessly invite students who could be interested in your event from right within the platform. Students on the platform self-report as many as 300 data points, so you can target students on any number of factors, including their college, geographic location, major, or even what their interests and values are. You can also control whether you want the event to be private or public, allowing you to keep events exclusive when necessary, helping to engage your highest-value candidates.
Looking for an early-career events management platform?
Learn more about RippleMatch Events
Drive Attendance After Candidates RSVP
Getting candidates to RSVP is just the first step in hosting a successful event—ensuring they actually attend is a greater challenge. With RippleMatch, anyone who RSVPs will automatically receive two reminders, 24 hours and 15 minutes before the event. You can also easily send personalized emails to candidates who have RSVP'd ahead of time, right within the platform. This allows you to open up the lines of communication immediately, helping candidates get to know a bit about your company and opportunities even before attending the event. It also helps you cultivate a relationship that can increase the chances they’ll actually show up to the event itself. And you can do all of this without having to manage a single spreadsheet!
Effortlessly Follow Up After The Event
Just as you can easily email RSVPs ahead of the event, you can also follow up with both attendees and those who missed the event afterwards. For RSVPs who didn’t show, you can share a recording of the event, send additional information about your company, and invite them to future events when their schedule opens up. For those who did attend, you can work to identify who are the most engaged, continue sending them nurturing emails, and even send a direct link to apply for open roles.
You can easily customize your follow-up efforts to the type of event you’re hosting. If it’s an Early ID event or a general information session in the off-season, you can plan to follow up with attendees every few months to invite them to future events or provide additional information on your company. With RippleMatch CRM, you can even add them to specific communities to easily engage with them in the future. With in-season events for students who are ready to apply for internships or jobs, you can identify the best candidates and directly invite them to apply right within the platform.
Leverage Useful Analytics
With RippleMatch Events, you’ll also be able to unlock valuable insights into the students who RSVP and attend your events. Determine the effectiveness of various marketing efforts by using tracking links, which will allow you to see how many people sign up, attend, and eventually get hired from specific promotional sources. This could help you target your marketing efforts by eliminating or scaling back on what’s not working, and lean more heavily into what is working.
The event analytics also provide valuable information on RSVP demographics, the schools they attend, geographical location, and even the average GPA of RSVP’d students. This insight would be challenging to collect manually, but can be incredibly valuable when identifying gaps in your recruiting pipeline. For example, you may realize that you’re mainly attracting students from just a handful of colleges or from just one major. It’s a great tool to help improve your diversity hiring and analyze how to reach a broader group of candidates.
Streamline In-Person Events
RippleMatch is a great full-service tool for hosting virtual events, but it’s also an ideal supplement to your in-person events—whether they’re self-hosted or larger scale career fairs. Staying organized is one of the biggest challenges of in-person events. Keeping track of everyone you meet, juggling a bunch of paperwork, and then figuring out how to get all of the candidates into a spreadsheet to follow up with afterwards can be a huge hassle, and often results in great candidates slipping through the cracks.
With RippleMatch Events, you can go paperless and keep all of your candidate data in one place. Easily (and quickly!) check candidates in with a QR code, keep track of you who meet at different events, and maintain records of candidate resumes and important background information, all within the platform. Of course, you can also easily follow up with students you meet by sending emails from the platform—you can even “thumbs up” students you meet throughout the event to keep track of your highest priority candidates, making it simple to identify your top targets. Soon, the events tool will be even more powerful, with a mobile experience, live candidate evaluation, and more.
However you plan to attend and host recruitment events this year, RippleMatch can help. By keeping all of your information in one place and empowering you with detailed analytics, you won’t have to worry about losing great candidates from poor processes anymore. And you can do all of this while getting hours back in your day. Gone are the days of managing paper sign-up forms and manual spreadsheets. Supercharge your events and streamline your recruitment process with RippleMatch.
Looking for an early-career events management platform?
Learn more about RippleMatch Events
