For more information about Unisfair, visit their website at www.unisfair.com. Or contact Brent at 866.354.4030.

We hope you enjoy the podcast!

Three ways to listen to the podcast:

1. You can listen using our java-enabled player at the top of this post.

2. Or you can listen to the podcast in your computer's mp3 program by clicking the "Play mp3" button below (or right-click on the button and select "save target as..." to save the mp3 to your computer).

3. Or you can download the podcast and subscribe to future podcasts via iTunes.

The transcript for this podcast follows:

Mike Coffey: Welcome to the Imperative Podcast. I’m Mike Coffey, President of Imperative Information Group. Really quick, I want to tell you about a study we’ve just completed. We tested the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Criminal Records Database for accuracy and completeness.

The short version of the study is that the state’s criminal records database is missing 34 percent of the cases that actually put people on death row. It’s also missing 36 percent of all the other felonies and 40 percent of misdemeanors and even serious misdemeanors like DWI and assault. This is the database many employers and state agencies rely on as their chief criminal background check. So, if you’re an employer in Texas, you need this information. You need to visit our website at ImperativeInfo.com and download our study. Now, on with the podcast.

Mike Coffey: The internet has changed the way companies identify and recruit qualified employees. Sites like Monster.com and Career Builder give recruiters visibility and access to millions of job seekers. Social networking tools like LinkedIn and Facebook are expanding recruiter’s networks from dozens of people to literally millions. Email, text messaging, even Twitter have put recruiters and candidates in closer contact.

One recruiting tool that technology hasn’t dramatically changed in the last two decades, though, is the job fair. Our guest today is Brent Arslaner, vice president of marketing for Unisfair, a company that helps to drag job fairs into the 21st century. Unisfair delivers what they call virtual events including virtual job fairs. Welcome Brent. What is a virtual event?

Brent Arslaner: A virtual recruiting event or job fair is just like a physical job fair in which job seekers can upload their resume. They can field the positions, put job listings into their briefcase, apply for positions the prime list support and they can also have live interaction with employers so they can start that dialog. Likewise, employers can post positions, interact with job seekers, screen applicants. You know, it’s really about helping companies really build a pipeline of qualified candidates in advance of deciding to bring them or fly them to their headquarters or anything else, it’s kind of that initial process.

Mike Coffey: What does it look like to an employer? I mean, you walk into a convention center at a real job fair and there may be 50 other employers or it may be a company specific event, but you’ve got a whole bunch of job seekers milling around, maybe some of them attending different kinds of conferences and things like that and then just walking up to employer’s tables and submitting resumes or talking to recruiters. How does a virtual job fair relate to what we’re used to when we talk about a job fair?

Brent Arslaner: Sure, it’s actually also a very similar paradigm where you can walk in and there’s a main hall.

Mike Coffey: A virtual hallway or -?

Brent Arslaner: Yeah, right. You walk in and you can brand it and if you want it to look like a football stadium or if you want it to look like a sky scraper, you can customize the entry, and then when you enter, you’ve got navigation to different venues and that could be the conference hall. Within the conference hall, you can basically have conference sessions where you could learn about what it’s like to work at a given company, or it could be about trends within a workplace, what jobs are going to be expanding in the next ten years or what have you.

Beyond the conference hall, you have resource centers where you can have basically audio, video and Power Point, animations, different types of files. You have a networking lounge where you could go and actually network with other people that are in the environment. And then you have the exhibition area, which is where there’s recruiting booths. So, each of the booths you can staff and you can brand it for your given company and then again have live interaction directly with the job seekers or applicants within the environment.

So, just like a physical job fair, you have different locations. It’s a point and click, easy environment. The learning curve is very straight forward and you can walk around to the different locations.

Mike Coffey: Do these kind of events usually have like a fixed time, like 8:00 to 5:00, when we usually do a job fair or are they more flexible in time, so that applicants and job seekers can meet recruiters on unconventional schedules?

Brent Arslaner: Right, so typically, just like a physical event, there is a fixed time. The major difference is so say again, its 8:00 to 5:00 in Pacific Standard Time, of a given day that afterwards you can keep the environment up for as long as you would like. It could be a week. It could be a month. It could be a year. It really comes down online, it comes down to if there’s gonna be individuals that can staff the booths.

So, we talked to many companies that they might still have a recruiter or someone from HR that even after the live timeframe will staff their area as more applicants come in and, are not able to actually join the event during the live time period.

Mike Coffey: So what kind of companies are using virtual job fairs right now?

Brent Arslaner: There’s a few trends. We see companies that are decentralized, are not complex businesses, you know, in this world where outsourcing and telecommuting and even global companies are finding more creative ways to staff. We work with a lot of large companies, like for instance, KPMG did a global recruiting event with us two weeks ago in which they did a 48 hour event, 48 hours straight and were looking to basically fill positions throughout the globe. There were numbers of 110 different KPMG offices that were there to communicate with attendees and they were using it as a mechanism to help fill positions in a lot of the emerging growth countries such as Brazil and India and China and such.

But beyond globally decentralized companies, I think that we see trends in terms of certain sectors where’s challenging to find qualified applicants. Nursing has been an area I’ve had some in healthcare. It could be that there’s a surplus in Boston, but there’s a shortage in Austin, Texas, so we can help kind of rectify the disequal around. We’ve done events for oil and gas where it doesn’t make sense if someone’s gonna work on a tanker in Dubai, you probably are not gonna fly them to Dubai, so it wouldn’t make sense. In terms of other businesses that there’s a significant amount of turnover and that could be cruise ships or that could be retail stores. So if you have a large employee base and there’s a relatively continual turnover, you need a mechanism that you can continually kind of grow that pool of applicants within the environment.

Mike Coffey: Is there any special kind of software that either the job seeker or the HR folks need to have installed for this event to work like this?

Brent Arslaner: No, you just need to have a browser.

Mike Coffey: So when a recruiter is talking to a job seeker, are you talking to a cartoon character or some sort of avatar or is it webcam based? How do you have a sense of who you’re talking to?

Brent Arslaner: So, there’s a few things. One is, again, the profile is really similar to linked interface, but where you can have an image of yourself. We don’t fundamentally avatars are the way it’s gonna work, so you don’t have to build an avatar and get dressed and all that. The way that you communicate with a recruiter are either text based so you can do chat, IM. We’ve done cams, we’re actually incorporating similar to what we’re on today, you know, Skype or voice interaction. So, there’s a few different methods that you can communicate directly with them.

Mike Coffey: What are the first steps if a company’s considering hosting a virtual event, what are the first steps in evaluating whether or not it’s the right move for them?

Brent Arslaner: Well I think there’s a few things. One is you gotta look at your target market. I mean, the good news is that we’ve taken a pretty pragmatic approach that because the learning curve’s pretty easy, you know if you’re recruiting 30, 40, 50 year olds, it will work, versus some of the other virtual world technologies that are really kind of catered toward Gen Y and such. Beyond that, I think a lot of the steps are very similar to a physical event where how are you gonna promote it; it’s a little different, versus trying to bring everyone to the Hilton or the Marriott on a given day. The methods that you are going to use to promote it are gonna vary typically, more online methods, beyond email, using Google and even using other kind of social media methods to drive traffic.

But I think a lot of the same tenets take place where promoting early and often are really important, potentially even sometimes working with a media partner to help drive audiences, is helpful. But we see that first take a look at your market and then put together, just because it’s virtual, doesn’t mean that there isn’t some planning involved. So beyond promotion we have event managers and producers that work with the companies that help them kind of really manage the entire project and make sure that they’re successful.

Mike Coffey: I guess the one downside for the applicant is that you don’t walk away with a bag full of stress balls and key fobs and things like that that you usually see at these sorts of events.

Brent Arslaner: Well, you know, it’s funny. We do a lot of different types of events and we’ve even had folks that as a stress reliever they can play a couple holes of video golf and you know what? You can still have give-a-ways. We do have, I can think about in a few events we done where they’re giving away tickets to the Super Bowl or you can win a Wii or an iPod. Granted, there’s not that immediate gratification of having it in your fingers at that moment, but the same parallels can take place.

Mike Coffey: That’s the most important part of the job fair. So, from the applicant’s point of view, if someone hasn’t ever participated in a virtual event like this, are there different rules of the road from the applicant’s point of view?

Brent Arslaner: I think there are a lot more similarities in terms of be prepared, have your questions, you know, do homework around the companies. Beyond that, I think what it allows you to do is be very direct and if there’s a few pieces of information you’re looking to gather at events in deciding if you’re interested in a given company, this is a perfect outlet. You need to do that. Beyond, and I think I mentioned previously, you can share more than your resume. If you have a portfolio of your work and samples and such that are online, you can share them. It builds a fuller picture, so everything about yourself beyond a one page or two page word document.

And the same, I think you still need to be professional. Even though you’re online, you could be at home, you need to be professional in terms of how you communicate with the hiring managers and don’t be afraid to ask about what’s next in the process, if that’s an in person meeting or what the process is of deciding how you’re going to fill this given position.

Mike Coffey: If a company is considering putting on a virtual job fair, how do they get an idea of what the cost would be versus doing it conventionally?

Brent Arslaner: It really is based upon the size of the event and to us, the size of the event means how many booths are you gonna have, how long is the event going to be up? If its like the KPMG example where it’s 48 hours straight, we have support people that will work with you and your organization throughout. So it’s how many booths? How long do you want to be live and then sometimes, again, within the conference halls, how many sessions? Because we can also be involved in helping our clients produce multimedia content. We do events that could just be a couple booths and it’s fairly small, and we do events where there’s hundreds of booths.

Mike Coffey: So like everything else, I guess it depends on what you want and what you want to pay for?

Brent Arslaner: Yeah, it does. And typically a virtual job fair will kind of start in the 25K range and on average the attendance will be 1,500, is about the average attendance and it can grow significantly from there. If the purpose is to do something very small, then it might not be the best fit.

Mike Coffey: But if you’re attracting candidates from all over the country or all over the world, you get a better, a lot deeper candidate pool than you would if you were just in Boise, Idaho or Fuller, Texas or someplace doing just a single event.

Brent Arslaner: Yeah, that’s right. And again, we do also see many of these events that are put together by one organizer, but yet there’s 100 or 25 sponsors.

Mike Coffey: So this is really interesting technology. Outside of recruiting and holding job fairs, how else can HR use these kind of events?

Brent Arslaner: We’ve seen a few things that makes a lot of sense I guess. Employee onboarding, you know, I think we see a lot of need. We’re a great place to share rich multimedia and help people get onboard. I think training and as onboarding kind of links to training, we see companies use our platform for both internal as well as external meetings when you wanna train partners and other constituents of your organization. I think those are – onboarding and training are probably closely aligned and be the most common purpose.

I think the other thing that I’m becoming the more and more believer, is there’s such a tight linkage between marketing and recruiting in HR. At the end of the day, recruiting is selling your company and we work for a lot of companies that are using us to create awareness, lead generation, nurturing, but at the end of the day, it could be a combination of trying to drive demand for the products but we’re also selling their companies. And we’ve used part of our environment to also recruit.

Mike Coffey: You mentioned training, but what about actually holding industry conference or a lot of the HR associations have meetings, what about things like that?

Brent Arslaner: Yes, no, and so we also do, yes, every flavor of meeting, and I apologize for not me not answering it right up front, but yes, any conference, trade show, expo, you know, small, mid-sized meeting, product launches, association meetings, these are all common uses of our technology, both again, internally oriented or also externally oriented.

Mike Coffey: And with travel expense and everything else that’s going on in the economy, this could be a real cost saver, maybe not drag people out of the office for a day of travel on each side of a meeting and all that.

Brent Arslaner: No, and so yeah, that’s absolutely. And I think the economy as it is does make it very difficult. You know, some of the first things the companies are cutting are travel and recruiting and marketing and training, so we do provide a cost effect solution. But it’s more than cost effective. I think a lot of what we can do is show the ROI versus other methods. From the standpoint that everything that occurs in our system is tracked so we can show some really detailed metrics to be able to help rank candidates, to see how well people are learning information from the training perspective, or to gather how interested prospects are in a given solution.

Mike Coffey: Great. I appreciate you joining us today, Brent. Is there anything else you think our audience should know about hosting a virtual event?

Brent Arslaner: Well I think the only other thing, the trend that we see is instead of, you know, we’re talking a lot today about a virtual job fair that takes place at a given point in time for a day or two days. But we are seeing a growing channel where people will use our environment as a year round platform for recruiting or training. Its like anything else, physically, it has to end. Online, it doesn’t.

Mike Coffey: Thanks for joining us today, Brent.

Brent Arslaner: Thank you.

Mike Coffey: Brent Arslaner is Vice President of Marketing for Unisfair. You can learn more about virtual events at unisfair.com. That’s U-N-I-S-F-A-I-R dot com, or you can reach Brent at 650-330-2164. Thanks again for listening to The Imperative Podcast. In today’s economy every business decision is critical. There is no margin for error. In the human resources context, this means that the cost of hiring the wrong person is simply too expensive.

Imperative’s clients make better hiring decisions because they invest in reliable and meaningful background checks. Think about it. Can you really afford a cheap background check? If not, we should talk. Call me at toll free 877-HRfacts. That’s 877-473-2287 or visit us online at ImerativeInfo.com. Thanks again for listening to The Imperative Podcast. Have a great week.