Note: The Doc­tor is enjoy­ing the U.S. hol­i­day. This piece from 3 years ago is still quite per­ti­nent. Check it out!

As famed New York Yan­kee (and St. Louis native) Yogi Berra once said, “It’s deja vu all over again.” While he was talk­ing about base­ball, the com­ment could eas­i­ly apply to the recruit­ment mar­ket­ing busi­ness these days – specif­i­cal­ly, the resur­gence of offline to sup­ple­ment (or even replace) online hir­ing.

Don’t believe me? Well…”Indeed is intro­duc­ing a ser­vice to orga­nize and pro­mote hir­ing events so that employ­ers can focus on hir­ing and not on event man­age­ment,” accord­ing to HCM Tech­nol­o­gy Report. Why? Accord­ing to Indeed’s own blog, their employ­ers are being over­whelmed by resumes for ware­house and sim­i­lar jobs (geez, won­der why?). The arti­cle goes on to note that “Indeed Hir­ing Events pro­motes events on Indeed, texts and emails reminders to inter­est­ed can­di­dates and helps employ­er hir­ing teams to pre­pare based on esti­mat­ed turnout. At the event, com­pa­nies can track and qual­i­fy can­di­dates as soon as they sign in, then use the sys­tems records to fol­low up with promis­ing can­di­dates lat­er.”

Inter­est­ing, eh? The real­i­ty is, how­ev­er, that for many job boards and employ­ers, offline nev­er went away – it just got less pop­u­lar. In face, offline events have main­tained pop­u­lar­i­ty in sev­er­al sec­tors, includ­ing retail, the above-men­tioned ware­house and logis­tics, col­lege hir­ing, and vet­er­ans. What has changed, how­ev­er, is the sophis­ti­ca­tion and orga­ni­za­tion of these events – from tar­get­ed upfront mar­ket­ing, through the on-the-ground expe­ri­ence for can­di­dates, and the fol­low-up by employ­ers. A com­mon com­plaint of offline has long been the dif­fi­cul­ty in track­ing results. That seems to have changed over the past decade.

But why should you care? Hon­est­ly, maybe you should­n’t – if you focus on a sec­tor that does­n’t respond to offline events (tech, per­haps?), then maybe it isn’t worth your while.

On the oth­er hand, look at LinkedIn: as I men­tioned ear­li­er this year, they are exper­i­ment­ing with ‘pop-up pubs’ in the UK, to intro­duce the range of jobs they offer for job seek­ers. Response has been dou­ble (or more) what they expect­ed – and employ­ers are clam­or­ing to par­tic­i­pate. You would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think Linked­In’s tar­get job seek­ers would go to an offline event – except they did­n’t call it a career fair; they called it the ‘Linked Inn’ pub. Smart. (Well, I’m sure the alco­hol helped, too!).

So which job boards are using offline to build their employ­er and can­di­date audi­ences? Well, Recruit­Mil­i­tary, ClearedJobs.net, Prac­ticeLink, and Dice, to men­tion a few.

Does offline make sense for you? As is often the case, the answer lies with your job seek­er audi­ence. Are there loca­tions where lots of them are found, i.e. geo­graph­i­cal­ly con­cen­trat­ed? Are employ­ers also locat­ed in sim­i­lar areas? Do you have – or can you build/buy – sys­tems to man­age the event and its infor­ma­tion? And do you have staff that can take on what will undoubt­ed­ly be a time-inten­sive oper­a­tion, both pri­or, dur­ing, and after the actu­al event?

Maybe it’s worth a try.

I’ll leave you with one final word from Yogi: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Yep.

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