Product: ON24 Virtual Conference
Use Case: Demand Generation
Industry:Â Technology
More than 17,000 IBM employees were invited to the company’s multi-day Destination Africa Job Fair – and more than 5,200 registered – to learn about career opportunities and to interact with recruiters in the virtual environment. IBM also staffed its events with relocation experts and employees who have relocated to Africa. As a result, a talent pool of more than 1,000 candidates has been developed.
Attracting qualified candidates to a growth market
While IBM has maintained a presence in Africa for many years, the company has recently identified the continent as a future growth market, investing heavily to build data centers, regional offices and other infrastructure. And, while the company has many executives “coming up the ranks” in the region, it faces the short-term challenge of quickly attracting qualified employees for leadership positions in Africa.
Destination Africa job fair
IBM’s Enterprise Career Development team developed an internal recruitment strategy to identify prospective employees for its African operations. Working with ON24®, they created the Destination Africa Job Fair, an online event to source candidates for IBM jobs in Africa and connect them with recruiters to fast-track the hiring process.
IBM prepared extensively for the Destination Africa Job Fair by searching its worldwide database of 400,000 employees for those who might have lived, studied and/or worked on the African continent in the past. .This data mining included reviewing more than 20,000 resumes. As a result, IBM identified 17,000 employees to invite to the Destination Africa Job Fair.
With just seven weeks of prep time, the Destination Africa Job Fair featured five virtual booths with information on leadership, sales, administrative, financial and technical job opportunities in Africa, representing three major African regions and two IBM business units.
IBM’s virtual job fair connected to the company’s “Global Opportunity Marketplace” internal recruiting tool. The job fair offered private chats with recruiters, relocation experts and IBM personnel who had recently made the move to Africa. They provided practical advice and answered questions about the realities of moving to Africa.
IBM secures a database of likely candidates
Careful preparation by IBM created a highly successful event, exceeding all expectations. The Destination Africa Job Fair achieved the following:
In addition to helping IBM make progress toward its regional recruiting goals by building a larger database of potential candidates, the Destination Africa Job Fair has helped IBM to raise overall awareness of job opportunities in Africa.
Objective
Create a virtual job fair to showcase IBM job opportunities in Africa.
Strategy
IBM’s Enterprise Career Development Team generated a pool of more than 1,000 interested candidates through the Destination Africa Job Fair. Equally important, IBM has raised the profile of job opportunities in the African region by leveraging the online job fair as a tool to reach out to employees across the globe.
“IBM’s Destination Africa Job Fair has produced a significant number of candidates who have come forward and notified us that they are strongly interested in an immediate assignment in Africa. The number of interested candidates is still growing and will help IBM Africa meet its recruitment goals.”
Bill Phillips
Project Manager Enterprise Career Development
