3 Tips for Monetizing Your Virtual Career Fair

Most associations depend on annual and career fair events as a main source of non-dues revenue. But, with the dramatic shift to virtual events, how are associations supposed to backfill missing revenue that is essential for growing their organization?

Luckily, our expert team of Scribblers have developed three creative ways for associations to overcome this obstacle and still manage to make a high return on investment by hosting a virtual career fair.

1. Customized Event Packages for Exhibitors

Exhibitors - or employer companies - are looking for new ways to recruit highly qualified candidates from your association membership. These exhibitors know you provide the best talent in your industry, so they will want to attend your virtual event to get in contact with these candidates. However, employers will need other benefits to compensate for the lack of in-person networking experiences.

Associations can offer exhibitors customized event packages that are tailored to their needs and budgets. For example, some exhibitors may only want to capitalize on branding opportunities to make their company name more well-known, while hiring managers or talent acquisition might want to review resumes to find the perfect match for an open job or future opportunity. You can create different levels of packages with separate pricing options to meet the needs of all your exhibitors.

Some common items included in event packages are:

Job Postings

Including job postings in an event package is not only an added benefit to exhibitors, it’s also an added benefit for your association since it draws more attention to and interaction with your career center. If your association offers different levels of job posts, like premium, enhanced or basic, these can also become options for exhibitors to choose from. The more choices you give your exhibitors, the better chance you have of making an event package sale.

Resume Database Access

You can also customize the access exhibitors have to your resume database. For example, you can give exhibitors access to event attendees resumes for free, but then charge a fee to access your entire database. To make the offers more exclusive, you can offer access to your database for 30 or 60 days.

Branding Opportunities

Every exhibitor will want to advertise as much as possible to attract job seekers to their company, so this becomes a great opportunity for your association to capitalize on offering unique branding choices. A great way for exhibitors to advertise is by featuring their company on the events page for all attendees to see. This gives them a great deal of exposure and can even be linked to the exhibitor’s job board account with all their active jobs listed.

2. Digital Recruitment Guides

You may have heard about digital recruitment guides in our webinar, Drive Member Engagement and Revenue by Marketing Your Career Center (post COVID-19), but these are also an effective way to drive revenue with a virtual career fair.

This is another great opportunity for exhibitors to advertise their company as a whole, or promote specific job openings they want filled as soon as possible. Your association can offer pricing options based on advertisement size (full page, half page, etc.) or for the placement of the advertisement in the guide (back front cover vs. last page) based on how much exposure each placement receives.

You can even include this as an option in your customized event packages by bundling this option with job postings or other event perks you offer.

3. Event Sponsorships

Just like an in-person event, you can have companies or partner organizations sponsor your virtual career fair event and offer similar branding opportunities to the exhibitors. Your sponsor branding opportunities will mainly be included in your marketing initiatives to promote the virtual event like social media advertisements, email promotions and banners on your website. If you decide to offer a digital recruitment guide, you can include sponsors logos or other promotional materials about them in the guide as well.

Some associations choose to host their annual event simultaneously with a virtual career fair for maximum engagement, so you can also include sponsor promotion in online waiting rooms for recorded presentations, chat rooms and other online event workshops.

Although in-person events are on hold for the time being, there are still plenty of ways associations can turn a virtual career fair into a profitable and successful event that both members and exhibitors love.