Ever since the pandemic, many business operations have become virtual. Within the past couple years, we’ve seen video software, like Zoom, gain popularity rapidly. People across all jobs began to use Zoom for nearly every virtual meeting, get-together, and event they had, including job fairs. While it does seem like a good idea to host a virtual job fair using Zoom, it is definitely not the best option there. Here are 5 reasons why you shouldn’t be using Zoom for your virtual job fairs.
1. Poor Candidate Experience
Using Zoom can make for a very awkward experience for a candidate. When you join the job fair, candidates are immediately met with hundreds of other candidates. They don’t really know what exactly to do yet so they’re just left there to wait among hundreds of other people. Candidates are already nervous going into these events and being immediately faced with hundreds of other people is no help. Audio can also pose a problem. Audios may not be muted for everyone automatically which results in everyone talking over each other. This becomes overwhelming for candidates, and an overall poor experience for them.
2. Managing Breakout Rooms
If you’re using Zoom to host your job fair, you’ll likely be using breakout rooms. Keep in mind that someone at all times will need to be managing them and manually moving candidates from one room to another. Finding the right breakout room can also be confusing. It’s not uncommon to have candidates constantly going in and out of breakout rooms trying to get to the right one. Breakout rooms can end up being constantly disrupted and difficult to manage.
3. Inability to Rate Candidates
During virtual job fairs you’re likely meeting with tons of candidates. How do you keep track of the ones who do well and will move forward with interviews? Zoom doesn’t offer a built in way to rate candidates as you meet with them. You’ll have to manually keep track of this information elsewhere, which can get disorganized really quickly.
4. Meeting Limitations
Many users love Zoom because it’s free, but there are a number of restrictions with that free plan. Meetings are limited to 40 minutes in the free plan, which is nowhere near enough time to host a job fair. Most virtual job fairs last a few hours to give candidates time to attend despite their schedules. While you could create a new meeting after one times out, think about how annoying it would be to do that multiple times. In addition to that, you would have to keep resending new meeting links to everyone registered. This is a huge inconvenience for all parties.
5. “Zoom Bombing”
Virtual job fairs are a place for professionalism, so the last thing you’d want is to have a bunch of random people crashing your job fair. Unfortunately, all it takes is for a link to get leaked for this to happen. Keep in mind that more of these “zoom bombers” crash your job fair can cause more genuine candidates to lose their spots in the meeting. Don’t waste your time dealing with this. Choosing a secure platform to host that avoids this kind of disaster overall.
Hosting a virtual job fair soon? Avoid all these problems and use a platform designed for this purpose. Hellohire offers the perfect virtual hiring event platform to give both you and your attendees the best virtual job experience!