Leveraging Campus Career Fairs to Find Your Next College Student Employee

Campus career fairs are an incredible resource, not just for college students planning their careers, but for you, the recruiter! At career fairs, you can find smart talent to fill out your upcoming teams and projects. However, if you do not plan ahead or leverage them correctly, you will likely not be as fruitful as you could be. After all, you get what you put into them. Here are tips on how to use campus career fairs to your advantage and find your next college student employees.

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Invest Time and Energy

To use career fairs to their full potential, you need to be willing to invest not only money but time into your booth. College students can tell if this is just simply another day of work to you and they’ll walk right by. Instead, you need to catch their attention.

Devote time to creating an eye-catching yet informative poster board or introduction video and invest in freebies such as pens, magnets, and stress balls. The former will encourage them to check out your booth and strike up a conversation about your company, while the latter will stick with them more than a simple business card will. Just imagine, weeks after meeting you, they’re using your pen for homework, only to be reminded to call you for the next steps. A lousy display paired with a boring business card is not enough to be memorable, especially with a busy college student’s workload and schedule.

Show Off Your Culture

When tabling at a career fair, you need to not only talk about the kinds of work you and your company do, but the culture in the office or company. Does your company often have mental health retreats, catered lunches, or even a slide? Many college students are interested in working somewhere cool or fun as well as in a healthy work-life balance, so showcasing this side of your company will encourage students to take a deeper interest and do more research into your company long after the career fair is over and fall in love with the work you do too.

Choose Your Staff

Naturally, who you send is just as important as the information you prepare. You need to send your friendliest workers who are well-dressed or dressed to reflect your company’s dress code if it’s more casual, well-prepared, and well-rehearsed so they can answer any questions students have, and workers who are very friendly so that they properly engage with prospective student workers.

Take an Interest in the Students

Next, you need to take a real and genuine interest in every student you meet. They can tell when they are just another nameless face or if they had a bad experience talking to one of your employees. You should take an interest in their lives, not just in career goals. Ask about hobbies, their favorite classes, or even the weather to find some connection between you and your student.

This is another way to stand out in their mind. They won’t remember the worker who barely looked at them when handing them a business card and talking to their coworker, but they will remember the person who bonded with them over their passion for football and statistics. Your card and information will go directly to the top of their stack instead of shuffling down to the bottom of their backpack.

Reach Out

There is only so much time and space at a campus career to speak to these college students. Maybe your booth has a long line, students are only dropping in between classes, or there were so many booths students couldn’t get through them all while asking everything they wanted to. What you need to do is reach out and follow up via the contact information you were given, be it by phone or email, and speak further to students who expressed interest. This way, you can schedule a call to speak further where you can both get more information on each other and ask everything you didn’t get the chance to at the career fair.

It is best to do this within the same week of the career fair so that you are still fresh on the students’ minds. Waiting too long isn’t necessarily bad, but you may have lost to other companies who reached out sooner to secure the students’ interests.

As you can see, there are many actions you can take to prepare for a campus career fair and find your next college student employee or employees. By following all of these, you will leverage the career fairs as best as you can, and stick like glue in many students’ minds by being more than just any old business name. You are cool and great people who do interesting work that students would love to come work for!