A Review of DataCan’s Virtual Career Fair
An organizer’s perspective
This post is a retrospective review of DataCan’s first-ever virtual career fair (originally published at @DataCanOrg). To learn about our organization, visit our website and follow us on LinkedIn.
The Virtual Career Fair (July 2021) is DataCan’s first event since it evolved from Vancouver Women in Data Science in 2021 to support and amplify the diversity in the data science community as a non-profit independent organization. The goal of the virtual career fair is to connect data talents to employers over 1–1 mini-interviews (15min) and to make the job-hunting process more open and flexible over the global pandemic.
Since announcing the event in June 2021, we have received 167 resumes with candidates over three continents from the US, UK, and Canada. Via talking to the candidates during the event, we found out that the candidate’s pool comprises fresh graduates and experienced professionals. The experienced candidates come from different walks of industry, ranging from multinational companies to local startups in sport, telecommunications, accounting, and academic institutes.
Many employers have shown interested in hiring with us, as the event saved time and money for them to attend a career fair. They are Best Buy Canada, Plenty Of Fish (POF), Ecommerce Apps for Shopify, Unbounce, Orbis Investment, Mastercard, and Fortinet. The opening roles include Machine Learning Engineers, Data Scientist, Data Analyst, Data Engineer, and Software Engineer. One thing to notice is that the openings from Shopify are all remote.
The logistics of organizing this event can be seen as this chart below:
Both employers’ and candidates’ information were collected via Typeform. We then direct candidates’ resumes to the companies that they have a preference for. At that point, employers can pre-select candidates they are interested in chatting with. A 1–1 15min interview was then set up on the day of the employer’s choice. We believe the mini-interview could serve as the initial round of interviews to help our data talents and the employers to understand each other.
Based on the employers’ feedback, 57% of the candidates were moved to the hiring funnels for the next step (Figure 1), and almost all of them would like to be contacted for the next hiring events (Figure 2)
There are things we could have done better
Organizing an online career fair featuring a 1:1 mini-interview is very different from having it in-person. Lots of planning was conducted ahead, such as collecting resumes from candidates, communicating with employers, managing the pre-matching process, scheduling candidates’ mini-interviews for preferred employers, and setting up multiple interview rooms to hold interviews at the same time, etc.
Due to the limited number of time our volunteers have, we only ask each candidate to rank the top 3 employers they are interested in talking with. In addition, we were only able to allocate 1-hour of interview time to each employer. Unfortunately, some candidates got matched with an employer but were not able to talk with the employer. What we did to make up for that is to share all candidates’ resumes among all employers for future contact. One thing we could do is to send out a short video presentation of the employer to candidates prior to the end so that candidates could spend more time assessing the candidates.
Another thing we had missed is to list the seniority of the positions posted. This potentially affects the satisfaction of both candidates and employers. And we will keep this in mind for future career fair events.
We also found that many of our previous colleagues from schools did not know about this event even after the event. The social media platforms we have tried to distribute the information include: targeted Facebook/WeChat/WhatsApp groups, school alumni channels, data science NGOs, volunteer social media accounts, etc. How far the information can travel largely depends on how influential DataCan’s voice is. That is a new challenge for DataCan as a new Meetup group. Therefore, we designed our website with a landing page on a list of resources and information that our community members can benefit from. Additionally, we realized that people could also miss a post because it has been buried at the bottom of their news feed. In the future, we plan to have a better marketing plan to broadcast future events periodically. Last but not the least, engaging more with our audience can be an effective approach. One possible action is encouraging our candidates and employers to share thoughts about events on their social media channels and tag DataCan.
