How I Used Snapchat to Pull Off One of My Best Attended Career Fairs Yet

With the job market at one its lowest points in history, it’s more important than ever for those us in Talent Acquisition to think outside of the box. Starting a social media presents for just careers was already taking a step in the right direction, but we need to think bigger to achieve our hiring goals.

In 2018, our brand was struggling to find candidates for our Culinary departments. Culinary services employees are typically high school students, who are seeking part-time positions for after school hours, and unfortunately this is a department where openings and need fluctuates frequently. In 2018, we were finally starting to see our opening numbers fall, but our overall openings were still significantly higher than we wanted them to be.

In usual recruitment fashion, we decided the next step was to hold a career fair on our campus, and hope to attract enough applicants to fill a large number of our openings. As anyone in Talent Acquisition can tell you, turn out and success of career fairs has been dwindling in recent years, and so if we were going to hold an event that a) was this costly, and b) was this time consuming, I wanted to be sure we were going to get the most bang for our buck.

It seemed like any young person I saw on their phone was checking Snapchat. In fact, my younger sister was keeping conversations with her friends all through photos, snapped back and forth. It seemed pretty obvious that if we were going to try and get in front of these high school students, we had to get our event on Snapchat.

We recruit heavily from three high schools in our area, and so those were the areas that we targeted. Filters that read, “We’re hiring!” with our logo were created. We placed parameters around the school, and for the days leading up to the event, students were able to see and use our Snapchat filter. To help increase the reach of the filter, we made sure to tell our employees who attended these schools to look for and use the filter. Once they shared the filter to their own stories, the likelihood of the filter being seen by a larger audience grew substantially.

In addition to the filter, we created a Snapchat QR code. All around the high schools, flyers were hung with the code. When the student used the code, they were taken to landing page with our event information, as well as a sign up for a “drawing”. The winner of the drawing would be chosen at the career fair, and only those in attendance could win.

Finally, we ran ads on our other social media platforms promoting the event, as well as our Snapchat filters and QR code. I reached out to the school councilors for these high schools and asked that they promote the event with their students and student’s parents. We even convinced a few schools to promote the event on their morning announcements.

I would have never guessed that Snapchat would be such a vital piece if pulling this event off, but it was exactly the right platform to reach our targeted audience. The high school students were seeing and sending the filter to their friends, and they were even checking out our QR code. Had we been recruiting for different positions, Snapchat probably wouldn’t have given us the same results.

After the success of this event, I’m anxious to try out some of the other social media networks in the future. Video platforms interest me since I think we may be able to appeal to a large group of candidates in a variety of positions.

When all was said and done, we held one of our best attended career fairs to date, and it was all thanks to Snapchat.