When you are searching for your next candidate, your initial idea will be to turn to what you know and what is easiest.
This usually means uploading your job/s to a jobs board and waiting for applications to come through, or contacting your local recruitment agency, so that they can advertise on your behalf.
While this may or may not deliver your desired candidate, hundreds of recruiters who attend our Jobs Fairs often say to us “We’re looking for another way to attract talent and this is that way”. This has been said with some regularity over the past decade!
A good insight, plucked from our Birmingham Jobs Fair, is a recruiter saying:
“A really good candidate is not always great at writing a CV or selling themselves in black and white. You can get more from chatting with a potential applicant for a few minutes at the Jobs Fair, than reading their CV. On more than one occasion, had I accepted their CV without engaging in conversation with them, I would not have offered them an interview due to the quality of the CV. It goes to show that a lot of ideal candidates slip through the cracks of a bog-standard online process.”
Conversely to the above, we have had recruiters say they have wasted their time on candidates who had a “dynamite” CV, but when they brought them in for an interview, were nowhere near as good as they had imagined and wish they could have seen them first. Sound familiar?
Therefore, a Jobs Fair is this “other way”. It is a streamlined recruitment model that delivers you hundreds (sometimes thousands) of candidates into a condensed 3-to-4-hour time window. You can speak to a fantastic mixture of job seekers, from a wide range of backgrounds and skillsets, and really speed up the interview selection process. And perhaps more importantly, select the right candidates.
Don’t waste time on misleading CVs again, come to a Jobs Fair and make decisions based on what is in front of you, the candidate.