Career fairs are instrumentally important in a student’s path to connecting with potential employers, but they have to be well-implemented events to effectively keep students engaged. A poorly organized career fair defeats the purpose of having one, because students will become frustrated and attendance rates will drop. So how do you make sure your career fair keeps students interested and involved?
Make Sure Your Employer List is Enticing
One of the best ways to make career fairs worth it for students is to ensure that you get a significant number of relevant employers involved. It will take some time and effort to make these connections with employers and convince them to attend your events, but tools like CSM with employer outreach capabilities make it easier. CSM allows you to keep a full database of all employer contacts you’ve accumulated through networking or lead generation, then reach out to them with targeted email campaigns to grab their attention and get them to attend your career fairs.
Perform Student Outreach so They Know – and Care – About Career Fairs
Just as it’s important to reach out to employers and feed their enthusiasm about attending your events, it’s equally important to reach out to students in the same way. Use a tool like CSM to email various groups of students and personalize your outreach emails to their particular interests. For example, you could isolate students in STEM programs and send them targeted emails listing all of the big name tech employers that will be at the fair. The more you cater to each individual audience of students with your outreach, the more interest you’ll generate.
Make sure your emails to all groups of students are exciting and attention-grabbing while demonstrating what’s in it for them if they attend your upcoming career fair.
Keep Career Fairs from Being Frustrating
If you want students to attend your career fairs, you need to make the process as painless for them as possible. They need a streamlined way of signing up for fairs, preparing for them, navigating through them and performing follow-up with employers afterwards. Return to our past blog post on students utilizing the Careers by Symplicity app during career fairs to find out how the Careers app allows students at CSM-enabled schools to have the best possible career fair experience.
