If you’re attending a school’s career fair and they are hosting the event on another platform, such as Handshake or Symplicity, you can use RippleMatch to handle check-ins, follow-ups, and data tracking! This will allow you to track and manage all candidates in one centralized location with consistent data on everyone you meet.
Creating Event
In the Events section of the platform, click "Create Event +". You will enter the details of the event that mirror the event details of the career fair. The main areas to you'll need to focus on are:
Title- Name of the career fair and school
Who is organizing this event? - Select "Someone Else" since this is a career fair organized by someone other than your team.
Description- Input the name of the event, or any other helpful information that you'd like to store within the event for your team to see
Is this event virtual or in person?
Virtual - You can leave out the video conferencing link, as you and attendees will use the video conferencing connected to the school's preferred platform. Instead, write “N/A” in the "Link to Web Conference" field.
In-Person - Enter the address where the career fair will take place.
Visibility Settings - Set the Event Visibility to “private” with "No" automated marketing turned on. This event will only be seen by your team until you check candidates in. You are only using this event to track attendees.
Advanced Settings - Set the Automated Reminder Emails to "off" since the school is managing RSVPs, and nobody will be registering with you ahead of time.
Managing Attendees
As the school is handling RSVPs themselves, there’s no requirement to market/promote the event with candidates before the career fair. All candidates for the career fair will register ahead of time through their school’s career services platform.
Before the career fair, you will want to navigate to the career fair that you set up on RippleMatch's "Check-in Center". From here, you can prepare the different resources to be able to check in candidates during your event. You can refer to this article with details on the different check in methods.
Your goal should be to have every candidate that you meet check in during your event.
Post-event Management
Once attendees check-in to your career fair through RippleMatch, you will have all of their information in your event management page on RippleMatch! From there, you can send any communication or applications to your attendees through RippleMatch Events as usual.
We recommend sending a follow up communication anywhere from 24-48 after the event. That communication can be in the form of an email, invitation to interview, or an application to one of your open roles.
Check out this article on how to communicate with candidates through the Events platform via email!
Check out this article on how to send application to candidates after an event!
Having students check-in to your event through RippleMatch during the career fair will ensure you collect all of the data for your attendees, allow you to follow up with them afterward with a job application, invitation to interview, or email, track analytics, and keep all data from events in the same place so that you can use that information retroactively.