Before the pandemic, the recruitment team attended a lot of face-to-face events and the turnout was quite successful however due to Covid-19 these had to stop and these events had to become virtual. I joined during the pandemic so I was not able to attend any of the face-to-face events.
The virtual events that I have attended were successful however with these events you have certain issues that wouldn’t come up if it was face-to-face, one being connectivity issues. This is a hindrance as when you are trying to answer questions or talk about the roles we had available at the time it can be quite difficult to get the information across with the connection dropping out every so often.
As we have come out of lockdown we have attended a few more face-to-face events and so far so good! The most recent event we attended was the London Careers Fair and it really did show how much we have moved on from the pandemic. It was filled with potential candidates and we did not stop for 4 hours straight! We constantly had people at our stalls and even had employers from other stalls come over to take a look at our vacancies.
We gained a lot of interest from the public coming into the event however the only barrier we had was the location of our academies in the trust. We are based in South East London, Dartford, Medway and Central Kent and the event was in North London. However, we did chat with a lot of people that were looking at relocating so we made sure to pass our details on.
Overall, I do believe face-to-face events are making a comeback, it’s just making sure we are targeting the right people and the right area.
