Job Seeker Registration Form

Candidate registration at a career fair has one job: get as many relevant people into the room as possible, and know enough about them to tell your employers who came. Those two goals pull against each other, because every question that improves your reporting reduces the number of people who finish the form.

What this form does

It asks the minimum that is genuinely useful and branches rather than accumulating. A student is asked about their school and graduation year. Somebody with fifteen years of experience is asked about their field instead, and never sees a question about undergraduate study. Role interests and disciplines use the same lists as the employer form, which is what makes matched reporting possible in both directions.

Coaching slots for resume reviews and mock interviews are capped with a waitlist, because those are always oversubscribed and promising what your volunteers cannot deliver is worse than saying no. Resume sharing with employers is an explicit opt in rather than a default.

Who it is for

University and college career centres, workforce development organizations, and anyone running a job fair where employers are paying to meet candidates.

How to adapt it

Mirror the discipline list from your employer form, cap the coaching slots at what your volunteers can staff, and keep the whole thing under four minutes.

Setup checklist

1. Keep it short enough to finish on a phone in a queue. Candidate registration is often completed on the way to the event or standing outside it. Every field you add past four minutes costs you registrations from exactly the candidates who were least certain about coming.
2. Cap every coaching slot and leave the waitlist on. Resume reviews and mock interviews are the most oversubscribed things at any career fair. Capping them stops you promising what your volunteers cannot deliver, and the waitlist gives you a call list when somebody does not show.
3. Make resume sharing an explicit opt in. Candidates should choose whether their details go into an employer resume book, and the form asks for the link only from those who opt in. Sharing candidate data by default is both a bad experience and a privacy problem.
4. Match the disciplines to the employer form. Use the same discipline and role type lists on both sides. That is what lets you tell an employer how many candidates in their field registered, and tell a candidate which employers want their discipline.
5. Branch on candidate type rather than asking everything. A student needs to be asked about their school and graduation year. Somebody with fifteen years of experience does not, and asking makes your event look like it was designed for undergraduates.
6. Send the employer list in the confirmation. A candidate who arrives knowing which five employers they want to see has a far better day than one who walks in and reads a floor plan.

Before you publish

Register once as a student and once as an experienced candidate, and confirm the question sets differ. Fill a coaching slot to its cap and check it queues rather than blocks. Then time the whole thing on a phone.