Online textbook-rental company Chegg launched its
Career Service Center to give student users another way to locate a job. Now,
it’s adding virtual career fairs to the mix.
The fairs let students and prospective employers meet
online in real time on a monthly basis. United Healthcare has already
participated in one of the first and Adobe is set to take part before the end
of November, according to a report in eCampus News.
At the virtual career fair, students fill out profiles
about themselves and the career they would like to find, while recruiters can
specify the kind of employee for which they are searching. Students and
recruiters then share information during an eight-minute online chat, with both
asked to rate and review each other at the end of the session.
“There are two ways you can choose to follow up.
Recruiters can say, ‘Yes, I’d love to follow up with this student,’ and they
get a separate list of the students they liked, or they can choose to share
their contact information with a student as soon as the session is over,” Carly
Keller, marketing manager of career services at Chegg, told USA Today.
“Then those students go into a regular phone or in-person interview after that.
It’s in the hands of the recruiter.”
Chegg has to be pleased with the initial results. More
than 1,500 students from across the nation signed up for a fair that focused on
science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) companies, including Adobe,
Progressive, and AIG.
“There’s no way in which we would ever plan to charge a
student to attend something like this,” Keller said. “The world of recruiting
is that the talent teams and HR teams send money to reach out to candidates,
and we are just trying to find more and more effective ways for students to
have these opportunities with employers.”
