Below are three key considerations to keep in mind as you help your students prepare for virtual fairs. These reminders are also outlined in the Student Invite Email Templates and Handshake’s Guide to Attending a Virtual Fair that you can send directly to your students. Also, check out our Guide to Virtual Fair Marketing for a week-by-week plan on how to incorporate these reminders in your student outreach.
1) Encourage students to sign up for employer sessions
Remind students that in order to meet with an employer—even if they want to drop-in the day of the fair—they need to both register for the overall event and sign up for a group or 1:1 session before the specific session starts.
- Link students directly to the “Your sessions” tab (add #sessions onto the end of your career fair URL when promoting the link to students) to encourage proactive session signups. Students will have a view of their fair schedule and be able to browse open sessions.
- Include information on signing up in all student emails. Share this help article and this video that walk students through the signup process.
- Encourage employers to message students ahead of time. Students are more likely to sign up for a particular session when they hear directly from the employer.
Handshake will help you drive student sign ups with popup notifications that appear after students register for the overall fair directing them to sign up for sessions. We will also send system-generated reminder emails and push notifications to registered students two days before the fair and the morning of to promote session signups.
Aim to have 50% of registered students signed up for an employer session one week before the fair.
2) Remind students to update their Handshake profile
Employers have the option to set student qualifications for their 1:1 sessions. Currently about 50% of employers use qualifications for 1:1s. To ensure students qualify for these sessions, make sure they fill out the following fields on their profile:
- School year, major and GPA, which can be found on their profile
- Work authorization status, which can be found on the Privacy & Settings page
If a student leaves one of these fields blank, they will not be able to register for a 1:1 session where that field is used as a qualification. For work authorization, students have the option to decline to answer. Doing so will allow students to qualify for 1:1s requiring work authorization.
In August 2020, we’ll release updates allowing your team to see which 1:1 sessions have qualifications. If an employer is seeing low 1:1 session sign ups, you can recommend they can relax their qualifications. Reminder: group sessions are open to all attendees.
3) Students should double check their technology
Remind students that it’s a good idea to double check their technology before a virtual event.
To participate in virtual fairs, all students will need a reliable internet connection, speakers and microphone, and a supported device. Students who wish to use their video will need a webcam. Students will be able to join a session five minutes early to test their connection.
Learn more about technical requirements and troubleshooting for virtual fairs here.
For more resources to help drive student success at virtual fairs, check out:
- The Handshake Virtual Engagement Kit for videos, blog posts, and help articles
- The Guide to Virtual Fair Marketing for a week-by-week plan to promote your fair to students and employers