The digital Recruitment Fair event, aimed at university students, was held twice in the Tuudo app in 2023. The January event focused on finding summer jobs, while the September fair revolved around part-time job opportunities. Both events featured a diverse range of job opportunities, from summer and part-time jobs to thesis positions, internships, and permanent full-time positions. Over 100 employers and more than 100,000 students nationwide participated in the fair events.
The first ever Recruitment Fair took place in January 2021, inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, as physical recruitment events became impossible but were still in demand. The digital pilot was so successful that the fair event has remained almost the same until 2023: users get to swipe through job opportunities, like popular dating apps, indicating interest by swiping right or left.
In 2022, the Recruitment Fair introduced a chat service and speed interviews as innovations. Out of these two, speed interviews continue to be organized, with over 50 employers offering them during this year’s fair. “The goal is to provide students with concrete experiences in the professional world” comments Iida Moskari from Humana. Each fair also traditionally includes a webinar on workplace topics, which was held over two days in both spring and autumn.
Tuudo’s Recruitment Fair’s main task is to connect university students and employers through job postings and employer branding. The 100% digital event is highly efficient and user-friendly, allowing employers to allocate resources to other tasks while students can participate at their convenience, even during lunch breaks or late at night. Marko Sipilä from Verohallinto who has participated in the fair for several years, praised it as an “[Messut ovat]easy and quick way to reach students.”
Loss of data – for a record-breaking reason
In the January 2023 fair, a record number of employers offering summer job opportunities participated. The event took place from January 16th to 21st with over 80 employers, in collaboration with Oikotie and the Responsible Summer Job campaign. By the third day of the event, all previous records from past fair years were broken. While 20,000 students attended the week-long fair in January 2022, this year, 30,000 students explored summer job offerings in just a few days.
By the end of the week, a staggering 55,000 fair attendees from 29 universities in Finland had visited the event. The actual number of participants was likely higher, but due to a sudden surge in participants, the server crashed, resulting in the loss of a significant portion of event data. Despite the positive cause for the server crash, the lost data could not be recovered, posing a significant inconvenience for employer participants. Thus we paid a big price for this record. Nevertheless, lessons were learned from the mistake, and similar issues are not expected to occur in the future.
Despite the technical setback, employers were satisfied with the event. Ulla Rusama, a recruitment specialist at Diakonissalaitos, praised the success of the fair, stating that she met many university students at a physical recruitment fair who had already applied for their summer jobs after seeing their ads on Tuudo.
Records are made to be broken – Autumn Recruitment Fair exceeded all expectations
We at Tuudo had just begun to recover from the record-breaking January fair when the part-time job-themed Recruitment Fair arrived from September 18th to 21st. In the autumn of 2022, just over 18,000 students attended the fair, so it was surprising to observe the fair traffic during this event. By Thursday, over 75,000 students from 30 universities had visited the fair, swiping job opportunities a total of nearly half a million times. The server also handled the challenge exceptionally well. Once again, all previous fair records were significantly surpassed, possibly setting a new record for all the Nordic countries.
Updates to the speed interview functionality resulted in more students applying for them during the fair. The two-day workplace webinar held during the fair week was well attended, with presentations from 20 employers. “We got to present our company excellently”, Moskari continues about the webinars. According to a feedback survey for Tuudo’s Recruitment Fair, webinars are interesting to students. The most common suggestion for improvement regarding webinars is to offer presentations in English, as more students wish to have presentations in that language.
We go again in January, but the search for summer jobs often begins at the end of the year
Tuudo’s digital Recruitment Fairs will return in January with a focus on summer jobs. The event is organized in collaboration with Oikotie and the Responsible Summer Job campaign. The event will once again feature swiping, quick interviews, and webinar presentations – most likely breaking another record for Finland.
Students often start looking for the right summer job at the end of the year, providing employers with an excellent opportunity to get a head start on summer recruitment through Tuudo. In addition to the fairs, employers can showcase themselves in the app throughout the year with profile presentations and job postings that appear on the app’s homepage. The Tuudo homepage is accessed an impressive 8 million times per month, making this opportunity too valuable to overlook. Registration for the January 2024 fairs is already open! Contact the career services team easily through a form or a direct phone call.