Job dating: opt for professional love at first sight!

By Inès Ikar

Published: 8 November 2024

Job dating has become one of the most popular recruitment methods used by recruiters in recent years. Inspired by timed romantic encounters, the objective is no less misguided: to find the ideal candidate! 🔥

The candidate has 10 minutes to convince you! As for you, you have to choose from around twenty candidates at the end of the day.

Ideal if you don't necessarily have the time to conduct a traditional job interview, Appvizer gives you all its secrets for creating a successful job dating!

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Job dating

Definition

Job dating is a recruitment interview that is often more informal than the usual recruitment on company premises. It usually takes place at a trade fair or even in a café.

Job dating emphasises the human values of the candidate by encouraging dialogue and the simplicity of a meeting over a coffee to get to know each other better, rather than the boring reading of a CV. Pôle emploi, APEC and specialist recruitment agencies have all recognised the potential of this technique and have already adopted it! So why shouldn't you 😉

The benefits of job dating for recruiters

Save time and money

In a traditional recruitment process, you interview your candidates for 30 to 45 minutes. In that same amount of time, you've already met 4 candidates during a job dating event! 💡

All these steps, although necessary, are time-consuming and require your company to incur certain costs. Even if job dating is followed by a real interview to confirm your choice, the fact remains that you save a considerable amount of time.

And saving time means saving money. 💸

Improve your visibility and employer brand

Job dating is a good opportunity to improve your brand image and employer brand. These are generally friendly events with a good atmosphere, enough to leave a good impression on candidates and your partners alike.

Don't hesitate to promote your job dating event on social networks!

A few pleasant surprises

When a candidate only has a few minutes to introduce themselves, they showcase their communication skills, their ability to summarise and their spontaneity. It's during job dating that you realise the talents that you might have overlooked if you had first read their CVs.

You are free to discover the candidate in a different way, and they are not reduced to a few lines on a piece of paper. Sometimes, some candidates even find it difficult to highlight the skills they list on their CV, so being able to share them directly with you for a few minutes is a real advantage for them as well as for you.

How do you organise a successful job dating event?

Step 1: Communicate the vacancy

Once you've carefully selected the positions to be filled in your company, communication is the first thing you need to focus on. Poor communication could result in a total flop, with candidates who don't have the profile you're looking for, or even no-one at all attending your event.

To prevent this from happening, your communication strategy needs to be organised around several points if you want to increase your visibility with candidates:

post a detailed advert on your career site or on a recruitment site to which you are linked. This is one of the best ways of letting potential candidates know that a job is available! Fill in all the relevant information, such as the town, sector, position, etc. ;
include a mention on your home page to maximise your chances of attracting candidates;
make extensive use of social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and other platforms where you feel it's a good idea to publicise your vacancy;
use other communication channels such as radio or the press.

💡 Tip: you can use recruitment software not only to organise your job dating, but also to promote it.

Step 2: collect applications from participants

Congratulations, you've got candidates who are interested in your job! To organise your event as professionally as possible, you can use an Excel spreadsheet to list all the applicants.

On this table you should indicate

the candidate's surname and first name
the candidate's number
time of arrival
their town,
the position they are interested in if you have several to fill,
an email address or social network on which to contact them,
a blank space for taking notes after the interview.

Step 3: Invite your candidates and employees

At a job dating event, you're not the only one interviewing. Choose colleagues you trust so that they can also conduct the interviews. The aim is for it to be quick and efficient, and for as many candidates as possible to be interviewed on the same day.

There are also job dating events with other partner companies to attract more talent to the event. Each company is then free to receive the candidates it wishes, and the candidates themselves are free to choose the positions for which they have come.

Step 4: use software to track participating candidates

If you want to save even more time and not have to manage the organisation upstream, you can also use specialist software to do everything for you.

Most of these solutions cost money, but you can be sure of organising a proper event that will give your company a good image and, above all, relieve you of additional stress.

Step 5: Make your choice

The day is finally over. You've interviewed each candidate and made sure to take notes at the end. Go back to your table and establish an order of preference. Remember that your first impression is often the right one!

It's only at the end of the day that you can look at the CVs and covering letters of the candidates who impressed you the most. If you're still convinced, contact them directly to tell them the good news.

And above all, don't forget to thank them for attending in a joint email, even if you don't intend to hire them. 👍