How to Plan, Execute and Measure Effective Recruitment Events

November 19, 2021

Beamery Team

Most marketing teams do at least some form of event marketing. Events can be excellent lead-generation tools, which is why so many marketers choose to invest in this channel. Recruiters and Talent Acquisition (TA) teams can learn a lot from traditional event marketing best practices, and apply the knowledge to recruitment events.

Talent teams can see similar positive results from recruitment events, but they have to be planned, executed, and measured effectively to deliver positive results – attract your ideal candidate, increase applications, and drive greater candidate engagement.

Step 1: Develop the recruitment events strategy

The success of recruiting events as a talent acquisition channel comes in large part from their integration with the larger talent strategy. For enterprise talent teams especially, it is very easy to fall into silos, with different teams working on different channels and not coordinating their activities to create a single continuous journey for candidates.

A good way to evaluate the current state of things (before launching a yearly calendar of events) is to have a meeting with the wider TA team and answer the following questions as a group:

What are the overall talent acquisition goals for the following planning period? And within those, what goals will the Recruiting Events team be responsible for?
What goals do you hope to achieve with your event strategy? What types of events can the team host, given the time and resources available?
What other recruiting activities will come before or after that event, and how should they align? Who are the stakeholders in these different activities?

It’s crucial that you are very specific when answering these questions. Even if it’s too early in the planning process to commit to any dates or budgets, it’s always a good idea to give at least a tentative plan or a ballpark figure in mind, and then you can refine it later on.

The expected result at this first stage is to finalize the following two items:

Short-term and long-term objectives of the recruiting events strategy. This will vary from company to company, but your objective might include: To create a target number of new leads, to improve your Talent NPS, to increase awareness of your employer brand, or to help work towards or meet your DE&I targets.
The resources available to implement this strategy, as well as the constraints placed on it, such as team members, external support and budget.

Step 2: Defining the right types of events for your company

Different types of events can achieve a range of different outcomes, and it’s worth having a quick discussion to weigh the options before settling on a plan.

Here are some options to consider:

Campus events, job fairs, or company briefings where you invite an audience, either students or another community, to learn more about your company
Networking events, either on-site at the company or at the venue of your choice.
Sponsored events where you may not be the main organizer, but where you associate your employer brand with a cause, a community, or a set of values
Educational events such as workshops, classes, or competitions
Other events such as VIP dinners and drinks after industry conferences

Note that sponsored events are only appropriate if the event organizer has an agenda that has a very low risk of badly reflecting on your employer brand. When choosing who to sponsor, it’s a good idea to invest some time in meeting with the organizers and reviewing their plans in detail. Pick an event with a track record of success, reliability and positive responses from candidates.

Step 3 : Setting up the team for easy planning and collaboration

Enterprise talent teams have the advantage of scale and resources over their smaller competitors, but they also face the potential loss of agility and speed in the process of going from the planning stage to execution.

If you have a larger team, you have more resources at your disposal, but you are at risk of wasting a significant chunk of them in simple miscommunications and lack of effective collaboration. Fortunately, there are steps that teams can take to facilitate better communication and collaboration during the event planning and execution process.

Build a task list and a collaboration forum for every event, to make task assignment and progress tracking easier. Clearly state the goal and purpose of each event, and make a note to add metrics detailing the results of the event after the fact.
Build a target list of candidates. Decide on which candidate personas are the best fit for each particular event. Your selection criteria might include geographic location, whether they’ve interacted with your company’s content before, or particular skills they might possess. Speak to hiring managers to get input on what specific skills they are looking for to help ensure that the event attendees are going to be a great fit for your organization.
Design a promotion plan that aligns with other recruitment marketing activities. This can include collateral and content distributed in advance, dynamic campaigns triggered by candidate behavior, or digital ads targeted to a specific audience.
Plan the supporting resources and logistics needed leading up to the event. Make sure you have a branded landing page, a registration form with electronic confirmations, and an efficient on-site check-in process. Prepare an automated workflow to build your guest list based on the criteria you chose earlier and to track event success after the fact.

It also helps to have a common talent team “calendar” that details the events that are in the works. It’s the kind of small thing that can help everyone keep the wider plan in mind, and results in a candidate journey that is well-aligned.

Step 4: Executing the recruitment event plans

People’s impression of an event can be influenced by the smallest things, from the sign-up and check-in experience to the lighting in the room where they have their networking chats.

There is no highly-guarded secret to a delightful recruitment event experience; it’s really all about careful, extensive, painstakingly detailed planning. Everything has to be thought through and looked at from the attendee’s point of view.

Some of these details are good practices that apply to all types of events. For example, you have to visit the event venue in advance whenever possible, and request images and floor plans when not. Make sure it has all the amenities needed for your event, including kitchen appliances if needed, wifi, electrical outlets at convenient locations, presentation equipment if relevant, not to mention ample parking spaces or convenient public transport access.

Some bits are more specific to recruitment events, such as ordering the appropriate amount of swag and collateral for your guest list, accommodating dietary restrictions and making arrangements for any welcome packs or goodie bags you plan on giving away on the day of.

The recruitment event organizers also have to make decisions around refreshments based on the schedule and the resources pegged for the event, and they must have a contingency plan in case the original plan has to change due to circumstances outside of your control. This could be anything from a speaker canceling to food not being delivered to presentation equipment breaking.

Now for the event day itself. You need to make sure you have everything in place, and people owning each of the following aspects of the big day:

Event sign-up and welcoming station, ensuring the candidates arriving at the venue flow in smoothly. It’s critical to make sure that the welcome desk is not a bottleneck, and allows people to flow in in an organized manner. No one wants to be scrambling over a crowd to find their name tag.
Collateral to inform candidates about the company and about the event specifically, from a simple mission statement and contact info for a casual meetup to a full event schedule and short speaker bios.
Clear instructions for all event organizers and participants, especially if you have invited current employees to meet and mingle with the candidates or to participate in the presentations.
Event point person, to be the central point of communication during the event. This person can provide last-minute information, make on-the-ground executive decisions about emergencies, and make sure all goes according to plan.

Step 5: Following up on the event

This includes both following up with event participants and measuring the impact of the event.

Candidate follow-up

The event follow-up should include personalized messaging for both the attendees and the no-shows, with some sort of call to action to candidates. This could be a “thank you” message and an invitation to come to a future event, a satisfaction survey to determine what they liked about the event and what needs improvement, or a link to job openings relevant to their candidate profile.

Any pictures, videos, or takeaways from the event can also be shared on social media and with the company’s talent community to keep the momentum going and raise awareness. This additional conversation is not only an opportunity for your company to stay top-of-mind, it also serves as additional promotion for new leads that come into your talent pipeline.

Recruitment events metrics

Different events have different goals, and it’s necessary to identify those at the planning stage (like we mentioned early on in this article), so that the team can set up the appropriate infrastructure to measure against those goals. Here are some of the most common recruiting event metrics:

Attendance rate, which is the ratio of attendees to RSVPs or to invitees
Conversion rates, as one of the most valuable impacts of the event is converting candidates to applicants
Time-to-apply or time-to-hire – specifically whether event attendees apply or accept offers faster
Event cost, and related metrics such as cost per attendee or cost per influenced applicant
Engagement, which can be measured by mentions, reshares, comments and likes on social media for the event
Traffic to the event landing page and click-through rates in email campaigns or ad campaigns

Take stock of the event’s performance, either in your internal dashboard, or by manually gathering and computing performance metrics if your event management system doesn’t allow for reporting.

Debrief with the team on what went well and what didn’t, based on the metrics above, but also on the event execution itself. Without debriefs, there is little opportunity to formalize what your team learns from every new event.

Updating external stakeholders is also important at this stage. Hiring managers, participating employees, or leadership executives, for example, will want to know how the recruiting event went and what impact it is expected to have on the talent team’s goals. Sharing this information will also make it easier to get their buy-in for future events.

Recruitment events attribution models

The tricky part about calculating ROI is that no recruitment marketing activity is ever single-handedly responsible for a single outcome. If an event participant applies to a role, it is probably in part because they attended the event, and in part because of other touchpoints with your brand.

This is why some teams build attribution models. An ‘attribution model’ is a framework often used in marketing and sales to determine how much each touchpoint with a customer contributes to making a sale. For recruiting, these touchpoints would be the different steps in your candidate journey.

There are different types of attribution models. A “first touch” model says that the first touch point in a candidate journey is wholly responsible for that candidate being hired. Therefore, you’d calculate the ROI in that model using this formula:

Event ROI = (Sum of value of candidates closed where the first touchpoint was the event - Cost of Event) / Cost of Event

A “last-touch” model works on the opposite assumption: basically, it assumes that the last touchpoint was the most influential in the decision-making process.

You can build a more sophisticated “multi-touch” attribution model if you want to give different weights to different steps in the candidate journey.