Everyone knows that good communication is a key component to commercial success – but not all communications are “good”. How can you be sure your PR gets it right?

Julie Fuge, Director at PR Agency Polymedia PR tells us ‘Good communication is effective communication. It’s clear and targeted, delivered with impact – critically designed to meet a set of commercial objectives. A PR strategy should be driven by what you want to achieve as a business or organisation – a response to your business plan’.

So, PR and comms might be important for your business to:

• Sell – generate sales, enquiries, new clients or customers
• Position – establishing your brand firmly in influential arenas
• Engage – brand is all about connection and engagement
• Influence – anything from securing a town planning decision or financial investment to objecting to proposed legislation or non-sustainable practices
• Retain – existing clients or customers – as important as bringing in new ones
• Manage – handling of change, restructuring, merger and relocation require careful communications management
• Mitigate damage crisis and issues planning and management
• Recruit – people make or break a business and attracting and retaining quality applications is key
• Promote – raise awareness of your brand and all it stands
• Include a combination of these or a host of others

Armed with your commercial objectives, a PR agency will consider:

• the audiences that we need to engage with.
• the bespoke messaging for each audience. They will all be different – an investor will need a different approach from an employee and a political stakeholder, different from a customer.
• How to reach these audiences. Through your website, SEO, through influential media, via digital marketing, at events, through partnerships and relationships, or on social media.

Then they will plan the tactics that put these all together – who you want to talk to and with, what you want to say to them, and how those conversations can be instigated. All PR activity can be evaluated to a greater or lesser extent – so the impact on your business is transparent and accountable.

Quality engagement with audiences is massively powerful. It’s key to organisations of all shapes and sizes, from entrepreneurial start-ups, to charities and PLCs – but that engagement has to be authentic and genuine.

Strategic PR consultancy helps you determine and distil exactly who you are, what your brand values are, what your brand stands for and believes in.

How does that relate to the people who are important to you?

In today’s multi-media world the lines between PR, marketing, brand strategy, web development, digital and traditional advertising have all blurred and we have found more of a focus on digital PR. The most important thing to remember is who do you want to talk with, what do you want to say to each and how can you reach them.

The PR tactical toolbox is massive

Depending on the message and the audience, it might include:

• Web development – for most organisations the website is your core piece of collateral. The enquiry generator and conversion tool. It has to be spot on with a design which reflects your brand, well messaged with logical SEO, engaging, responsive, functional and effective.

It’s likely that all other tactics are designed to feed into the website.

• Media relations
• Social media
• Influencer marketing
• Digital marketing
• Content marketing, blogs and re-purposed content
• Thought leadership
• Exhibitions and events
• Design and creative ideas

This whole toolbox has to be seen as part of a bigger picture – planned so the engagement with audiences is strategic, regular, consistent, designed well, high impact, effective – and as pain-free to deliver as possible. PR is all about delivering results through communications – and it’s important to every business.

The modern-day solutions have replaced old methods of hiring candidates. With advancements in digital technology and software, we can easily reach candidates residing at the world’s far ends. There is no confining within the borders when global businesses are set to create job opportunities for people across the world. Plus, the recruiters have a chance to hunt down the best resource from the list of global applicants. Note that if you continue to reform your recruitment practices, there’s a place for you in the digital world.

Traditional recruitment events appear to be a thing of the past. Today, the leading recruitment agencies have reshaped their hiring practices by making their recruitment events globally accessible. So instead of growing your team locally, you can tap on remote talent. For that matter, recruiters host online job fairs, career fairs and employee onboarding events at a virtual events platform. It is the ultimate platform to gather, engage and filter hundreds or thousands of job seekers.

So, are you an employer with a mass recruitment agenda or remote hiring plans? Then gathering global applicants online is a step in the right direction. 

Why Host Virtual Recruitment Events?

A virtual recruitment event is hosted online at a virtual events platform. The virtual footprint helps bring millions of people to a single platform simultaneously. Interestingly, the virtual job fair is easy to access from anywhere around. Attendees join the event using a laptop or mobile device with a stable internet connection. It diminishes the need to travel down to a physical location, commute to the venue, look for accommodation or bear any food expenses. It is a seamless way to connect hiring managers with top talent from across the globe.

How are virtual events platforms changing the international hiring process?

Virtual recruitment events maximize the opportunity for you to find the right talent from the crowd. It not only attracts remote talent to job opportunities but also allows them an equal chance to compete. In fact, a virtual platform ensures higher attendance from the global applicants leaving them no excuse to miss the event. It is a two-way road helping both employers and applicants alike. Overall, virtual recruitment events help you globalize the employer brand to create an uproar in the global marketplace.

Here’s a list of reasons why make your recruitment events globally accessible:

• Online brand representation
• Global employer branding
• Higher attendee turnout
• Access to remote talent
• Extensive resume database
• Global networking
• Reduced carbon footprint
• International reach

Ideas for Global Virtual Recruitment Events

How would you make your recruitment event accessible across the globe? The first step to making your event accessible to the masses is to go online. 79% of the candidates today use the internet to search for job opportunities. Searching for a job online is the primary approach for the majority of candidates. Therefore, a virtual recruitment event is now considered the best way to attract and hire global applicants.

On top, virtual events allow you to filter your audience. For example, determine your target audience to either attract national or global candidates to your virtual job fair.

Partner with a Virtual Events Platform

How would you set up a virtual recruitment event? For starters, recruiters partner with a feature-rich virtual events platform. The platform becomes your virtual venue for the hiring event. It comes with multiple customization options to replicate your physical office space. For instance, 3D animation, graphics, and visuals help create an impressionable virtual environment. So instead of moving people out of their houses, you take the event to their computer screens. Then, with an easy log-in system, the global applicants join the fair in a matter of seconds.

Virtual platforms mainly transform the experience of in-person human interaction with live meetings and webinars. By using the right technology and tools, recruitment events facilitate online interaction via text, audio or video chat. Here, the job matching algorithms ensures a quick candidate screening and onboarding process. It is an all-in-one solution for employers to post jobs, collect and filter resumes, screen candidates and hire the best talent.

The question here arises, what type of recruitment event would you host? The most common virtual recruitment events are listed below for you to consider your options well in time before expanding your workforce.

Virtual Job Fair: A job fair hosted online allows you to attract international applicants to live job boards. It gathers multiple employers to set up exhibitor booths and interact with best-matched candidates in real-time. From posting 100s of jobs to receiving millions of resumes, a virtual job fair helps recruiters through high-volume recruitment.

Likewise, the platform is built to accommodate and sustain large gatherings of people with great efficiency and accuracy. Check out the ultimate guide to hosting a successful virtual job fair.

Virtual Career Fair: Career fairs are mainly organized to engage employers with potential job seekers. Previously, universities held on-site career fairs to help fresh graduates discover a career path. The hiring managers from reputed organizations joined to educate and guide potential candidates on their career direction. Although, it did not offer an opportunity for remote candidates to benefit from the on-site career fair. Therefore, virtual career fairs are held to connect international applicants with global employers.

Now let’s explore how a virtual career fair works.

A virtual career fair hosted online helps expand reach by welcoming a global audience. Next, it offers a chance for the applicants to familiarize themselves with the jobs, company culture and the employer brand. Likewise, the interactive features allow employers to engage in 1:1 screening interviews. It is surely a win-win case for everyone involved.

Best Practices for Global Virtual Recruitment

Once you have decided on the type of event, it is time to create a memorable experience for your global audience.

Also, check a guide to the virtual recruitment process.

Attract Global Talent through Event Marketing

Employer branding is the key to attracting the world’s top talent. Also, with the rising market competition, it is not easy to hunt specialized candidates for the job roles. Therefore, one way to do it is by creating event marketing campaigns. The more people know about your event, the more opportunities you will have to attract the right candidates. Primarily, your business website and social media channels should talk about the hiring event.

Nowadays, social media platforms are considered the most effective to communicate the message across the masses. The more people engage in the marketing campaigns, the more there’s a chance for higher attendance. Thus, it is important to form an event marketing strategy that works well for your target audience.

• Build email marketing campaigns
• Run social media advertisements
• Embed event landing page to the company website
• Accept registrations well before the event
• Post attractive visuals from the event
• State benefits for attendees
• Use event listing platforms to list your event
• Have a welcome one, welcome all approach

Customize the Virtual Venue

To begin with, the virtual platform allows you to customize the entire event space. From the entrance to the halls, your virtual venue would speak about your brand and the company culture. In fact, you can use company logos, themes, and colours to design the halls, lobbies and booths. That way, you have the chance to familiarize the global audience with the employer brand.

Content Strategy to Educate and Train

After gathering the recruiters, hiring managers and candidates in one place, it is time to get the sermons started. Usually, job fairs are meant to familiarize the candidates with the company culture and the job openings. However, with a virtual job fair, you can host live or recorded webinar sessions to educate, engage and train prospective candidates. Apart from live chat and video conferencing, the platform allows you to share useful content such as company vision, annual records, statistical data, company videos, galleries, informative brochures, FAQs, and more.

Similarly, the platform offers an integrated system to educate and train fresh hires. With an active tracking system, the entire user journey of candidate training is tracked within seconds. Thus, a global audience is managed under a smooth process of employee hiring and onboarding.

Live Engagement and Networking

A virtual platform has built-in solutions for real-time attendee networking and engagement. It is considered a UCAAS unified communications as service platform for global businesses. First, the platform allows you to design the landing page with embedded live chat. Plus, it has navigational buttons to help them move about the venue. In addition, the employer booths attend to the candidates and assist them through live chat. The chat options vary from text and audio to video conferencing. As a result, your attendees build trust in the employer brand and actively engage throughout the event.

Higher attendance is not an issue when the live webinar sessions easily accommodate thousands of individuals per session. Similarly, the webinars offer a wealth of opportunities for live attendee engagement. For instance, attendees can directly engage with the speakers through live Q&As, polling, quizzes and private meetings. Hence, everyone has an equal chance to participate and network with eachother. This, however, does not work well in a large gathering of people at a physical location. For example, the time and space constraints limit attendee and employer interaction by 70%. Also, the heavy filing and documentation is a tiring job in itself. So why get stuck in old methods of hiring?

Final Thoughts

It is about time you rethink your recruitment practices. Virtual Recruitment Days hold an extensive portfolio in helping organizations tap at the global level. So make your hiring events globally accessible for talent hidden at far ends of the world. It is your chance to benefit from the vast features of the virtual platform and easily manage your high-volume recruitment needs. Hence, you expand the reach of your employer brand and score the best-matched candidate for the job openings.

Let us not confine business to borders and join hands with the best partners to create job opportunities for people across the world.