THE recruitment fair seems to have gone the way of the dodo, the zeppelin and the space hopper. Its moment seems to have passed.

Caroline Weeks, head of delivery recruitment at BT Global Services, rather misses the old recruitment fairs where companies used their collective power to lure candidates to meet them face-to-face.

Those fairs, according to Weeks, were an opportunity to correct preconceptions about companies and to sell the employer’s brand. “They were hard work but they were good for positioning the company,” she said.

“Up until seven or eight years ago I still attended IT fairs aimed at candidates with two or three years of experience,” said Weeks. “But they have gone now. You still get graduate and consultant fairs but not fairs that target people with some experience.”

The recruitment fair’s survival may now depend on adapting to the virtual world. Weeks said: “I suppose online jobs boards changed everything. I am not suggesting we bring back all the fairs, but I do think we have lost something that we haven’t yet found a way of replacing.”

Weeks said she was not against jobs boards – e-recruit-ment is “fast and dynamic” and opens candidates up to many more jobs and businesses.

Keith Dugdale, director of global recruitment at KPMG, has some sympathy with Weeks. The fair’s demise does mark a loss, he said. “Why do people accept a job offer? It is often because of the people they meet from the company.

“If you don’t have the opportunity for personal contact at the start, it means that candidates who are hired are less informed about the organisation,” he added. “The lack of face-to-face contact means they often have to be warmed up.”

However, Dugdale believes that the “real” fair is no longer relevant. “The fact is the recruitment market is much more global now and so there is less opportunity for face-to-face contact,” he said. “We have to learn new ways of communicating and interacting.”

KPMG has already run a successful virtual fair and plans to run more this year. “At a real fair, a candidate can have one-to-one contact with a person from the company but at a virtual fair you can “meet” a range of people from a company,” said Dugdale.

Does Dugdale know why graduate and MBA recruitment fairs seem to be surviving when so many fairs for more experienced people have died? KPMG, like most of the big graduate recruiters, still maintains a strong presence at real – not virtual – campus recruitment fairs.

Dugdale agrees with Weeks that graduate recruitment fairs provide the harder brand-sell deemed necessary in the graduate marketplace. “But the graduate fair also continues because it can rely on a captive audience,” said Dugdale. “Companies can be sure the graduate jobs fairs [often held on campus] will be well attended. You don’t get that guarantee at an open recruitment fair.”

Fairs for master’s in business administration (MBA) courses are also suffering from declining attendance. Jeanette Purcell, chief executive of the Association of MBAs (AMBA), said she and her colleagues frequently wonder about the future of the fairs – where business schools gather to recruit candidates. In the past five years, attendance at its MBA fairs has dropped by a third.

“The schools are still as keen to exhibit,” said Purcell. “It’s public attendance that has declined. What candidates seem to do now is research on the internet to narrow down their selection and then use the fairs to meet the schools face to face. The fair has become the final stage of the process but it still seems important. I think the AMBA fair will survive in this niche role.”

Biren Patel, marketing director for QS, which runs MBA fairs around the world, said that demand for the events remains steady. “We are confident the fair is here to stay,” he said, although he admitted that QS was examining internet opportunities.

All the same, virtual fairs are steadily gaining ground. The London Business School now teams up with eight of the world’s other leading business schools for an annual two-day internet recruitment extravaganza where 44 recruiters meet more than 1,400 MBA students seeking summer internships and permanent posts.

The savings to both recruiters and students are obvious. “The MBA Global Career Forum allows companies and candidates to interact without having to leave their desks, saving time and money for all those involved,” said Graham Hastie, director of career services at London Business School.

But doesn’t this sort of quantity inevitably lead to a loss in terms of quality? Just how deep do these virtual interactions go?

Andrew Baillie, business development director with Kenexa, an American supplier of software for recruitment, likens the new hiring methods to internet dating. “Candidates and employers both want a system that offers as many opportunities as possible to ‘score’,” he said. “They know there is a potentially vast talent pool and they want to cover as many bases as possible.”

Despite the frequent complaints from job-seekers about the impersonal nature of the early stages of recruitment in particular, Baillie argues that recruitment 21st century-style is best for both employer and candidate. He shows little nostalgia for the old fair.

Dugdale admits that, although something has been lost, he cannot see the “real” fair being revived. He jokes that when you have been around as long as he has, you never say never. There may come a time – maybe 10 years down the line – when the staging of a “real” fair may suddenly be seen as cutting edge and creative.

Weeks would certainly be interested in fairs aimed at experienced people, particularly in IT, if anyone wanted to revive them. “All I am saying is that nothing has replaced them,” she said. “I think people miss that face-to-face contact.” The Sunday Times Recruiter Forum is a platform for employers and industry experts to communicate with job candidates. They can share best practice and discuss the issues affecting recruitment and retention. Each week, forum members will appear here and at timesonline.co.uk/ recruiterforum, where readers can also have their say. To find out how your organisation can be involved, contact Brendan Jones at brendan.jones@newsint.co.uk

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