As COVID-19 continues to cause schools to shut their doors and businesses to close offices, many of our customers are exploring how to shift their in-person recruiting events to virtual recruiting events.

In this article, we'll cover how to host virtual coffee chats (also known as virtual office hours) with Flo Recruit using the software and hardware your business already has.

What You'll Need

1. Flo Recruit

2. A Computer or Laptop with a Video Camera and a Microphone (most computers today have this. If you don't have a camera in your computer already, you can usually purchase or rent an add-on to your computer. If your computer does not have a microphone, headphones will usually do the trick.

Set Up Your Virtual Coffee Chats

1. Create Your Event: Login to Flo Recruit, navigate to Events, and click Add Event.

2. Select Virtual Chats: When creating your event, you'll notice a new screen that lets you select your event type. Select Virtual Chats.

3. Set Your Event Details: Name your event, give it a brief description, and add any Event Tags you might need.

4. Schedule Timeslots: Create timeslots based on the availability of your team and build an entire Virtual Chats schedule in minutes. You can customize how many timeslots each candidate can sign up to attend, as well as the max capacity of candidates for each slot.

Even better, we autogenerate unique video conferencing links for every one of your Coffee Chats using Daily. Alternatively, if you want to use your company’s own web conferencing software, we give you an option to paste in a link using the Custom option under Video Link.

We recommend each employee spend a total of one hour, conversing with a total of 3 candidates for 15 minutes each. Leave 5 minutes between each session for the employee to jot down notes about the conversation in Flo Recruit.

5. Event Type: Choose Open Registration or Invite Only. If you choose Open Registration, any candidates who register for your event will receive the virtual web conferencing link you inputted into the event immediately after submitting their registration. If you choose Invite Only, only candidates who are approved by an admin will receive the virtual web conferencing link. For coffee chats, we recommend Invite Only so that you can control the number of candidates accepted to each coffee chat event available.

To further control which candidates gets access to the event, we suggest Manually Adding Candidates instead of sending the registration link out. If your event is Open Registration, when the candidate completes their registration after being manually added and receiving the email notification with the link to register, the candidate will receive the conferencing information immediately upon completion of registration. If your event is Invite Only, when the candidate receives the link to register, they'll receive a confirmation email that lets them know if they are accepted to the event, they'll receive the virtual conferencing information. After you approve the candidate for the event, they'll receive an email notification that they have been accepted, and that email will include the virtual conferencing information.

Note: If you choose to make your coffee chats Invite Only as recommended, you must remember to accept and deny candidates so that they receive the appropriate communications and instructions to attend the virtual coffee chat.

6. Set Qualifying Questions & Feedback Scales: Select 3 to 4 Qualifying Questions you’d like to ask candidates, i.e. “Class/Year”, “Graduation Date”, “Major” and more. Then select the type of feedback scale you’d like to use to rate candidates. You can use multiple criteria by selecting the Multiple Scales option.

7. Review and Edit the Confirmation Email or Approval Email: For Open Registration events, ensure the Confirmation Email includes clear instructions for candidates to sign in to your virtual event. Ensure the virtual web-conferencing link is in the Confirmation Email so that candidates can sign in. For Invite Only Events, ensure the ApprovalEmail includes clear instructions for candidates to sign in to your virtual event. In the Confirmation Email for Invite Only Events, tell candidates who register that they will receive further instructions if they are admitted to the event. Templates are already populated in Flo Recruit for this.

Conclusion

You're done! Now, candidates will be able to choose timeslots to attend from a screen that looks like this:

Your invited employee representatives will also receive the link to sign in the web conference within the email they receive to leave feedback on candidates that is sent 1 hour before the event starts.

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