Virtual Recruiting: 5 Tips for Creating Inclusive Events

Amy Barone, Sr. Director of Marketing Events & Engagement Programs at Tableau Software, shares her event marketing secrets in our A New Era in Event Marketing webinar with Harvard Business Review and AdAge. Below, she gives an inside look at how Tableau  grew and scaled a high-performance event program.

It’s a tough job market out there. In April of this year, the unemployment rate in the United States reached 14.7% — a percentage unparalleled since the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Turns out there is still at least one industry hiring: technology.

And it’s not just the largest players that are recruiting. The New York Times recently reported that many tech startups focusing on health, learning, fitness, and gaming — among others — are expanding and seeing an infusion of investment.

This trend has led both established professionals and individuals entering the job market to look at tech as their main prospect for employment.  

I work for a global nonprofit called Out in Tech, which unites the LGBTQ+ tech community and serves 40,000 members around the world. To better serve our members, many of whom are currently job-seeking, we have been organizing a series of workshops with recruiters to provide practical tips on standing out as a candidate.

During our first iteration of Out in Tech Talks | Career Edition in June, our panelists offered some astounding data and insights:

•  Mona Khalil from Greenhouse Software revealed that referrals account for 40% of offers. 
•  Avantha Arachchi from Bombshell noted that recruiters spend only 1-3 seconds looking at resumes before deciding if they should go further. 
•  Amin Gates from LinkedIn said that profiles with up-to-date work experiences received eight times more views and 10 times more messages. 
•  Jarvis Sam from Nike provided tips on figuring out if a company is LGBTQ+ friendly.

Aside from the valuable content our attendees left with, there was another important reason why this event was a success: It was built with inclusivity top of mind.

If you are in the process of organizing a virtual event, whether you are a recruiter or a community organizer, I’ve compiled a list of five tips you can use to create inclusive and safe event environments.

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Ten years later, our annual conference attracts nearly 20,000 customers and partners, our company has grown to 4,000 people, and we have a first-class marketing team with dedicated event professionals who are the best in the biz. Events have been a crucial part of our brand and help us better connect with our community, evangelize our customers, and ultimately grow our company.

Here’s how we did it:

If you are using a tool that allows you to rename yourself, like Zoom, consider asking attendees to add their pronouns next to their name. This ensures that correct pronouns are used for every person, and it sends a message that you respect the participants’ identities.

Image: Penguin Random House

Image: Conference Matters

It’s one thing to blindly upload an attendee list from a large industry event and blast everyone (you know who you are), but it’s another to know exactly who visited your booth, who met with your sales team, attended your event — they’re the ones that are the most engaged with you and they’re the ones you should focus on the most.

Though brief, that simple interaction with with the chef took the night beyond just an excellent meal.

Image: Google Books

When it comes down to it, the goal of any event is to grow and nurture the relationship between your guests and your brand — whether you’re promoting a product, building community, or looking to increase brand awareness.

There’s a lot of debate between whether or not virtual events should be video-on or video-off. The reality is that it’s up to your attendees and what they are comfortable with. Attendees may not want to turn on their video for a variety of reasons. Be explicit and intentional at the beginning of your event by saying “you do not need to turn your camera on.” If you are going to record a session or take a screenshot, make sure to warn people beforehand — giving them a chance to turn their cameras off.

Here are two examples from Out in Tech events as to why this is important: We hosted a recruiting event where one of the attendees did not want their current employer to know they were seeking a job. At another event, an individual was not publicly out as transgender and did not want a picture of them circulating online.

If you’re going to accept attendee questions, make sure there is a way for users to submit those questions anonymously and privately to the moderators (and explain how to do so at the beginning of your event). Even better: Allow participants to submit their questions in advance when registering for the event. (This also encourages attendees to actually attend your event, since they have a stake in the content.)

If all of your speakers share a similar race and gender identity, it sends a message that you don’t value equality and inclusion.

Having diversity of voices is about having a more well-rounded discussion: more vital perspectives, more varied experiences, and a higher caliber of conversation.

Here’s a practical example: If you are organizing a recruiting event, prospective candidates might not respond well to a homogeneous environment. A close friend of mine who works in HR had a candidate turn down a job offer as a software engineer because her five rounds of interviews only included men. This gave her pause about the type of working environment she would face.

Out in Tech has organized hundreds of events since its inception in 2013. While the bulk of our panel discussions went well, we’d sometimes receive feedback from speakers about incidents that had negatively impacted their experience, e.g., being interrupted by fellow panelists or being made to feel marginalized by the moderator.

We now share a list of best practices with all speakers to preemptively address behaviors they may not be aware of. Here are two excerpts:

•  Try not to interrupt panelists (unless really necessary) and encourage other panelists to follow that same rule.

•  Be mindful of “mansplaining” and “whitesplaining,” both of which have unfortunately happened at panels in the past. This happens when the moderator or another panelist condescendingly explains a concept or repeats something that was already said to women or people of color.

While most people might be mortified to learn that they were engaging in “whitesplaining,” simply making them aware of the possibility before the event has the power to prevent it from happening.

Find more actionable ways to build diverse and inclusive events by watching this on-demand webinar.

This is when having accurate event data readily available and synced between sales and marketing systems becomes crucial, so that executives, sales teams, and the marketing team are all on the same page. Event data is shared weekly or even every other day, so everyone has a clear understanding of things like RSVPs and check-ins, and can adjust their communications or follow-ups accordingly.

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This way, guests didn’t have to worry about memorizing each other’s names or drawing a blank when they turned to chat with the person next to them, and we also got to show off  our product in a natural way.

When the MediaMath team goes to determine the ROI of an event, they’re able to track and attribute opportunities and future deals to a prospect attending the event.

And from a budget perspective, they’re also able to look at data from all events over the course of a year and see which opportunities and deals are associated with people who attended. This helps them determine which events are working or what they should adjust, and where they should continue investing their marketing dollars.

Even if your event doesn’t require a full seating chart with assigned seats, think about how you want the flow of your event to go, and how you can create natural opportunities for meaningful connections.

Image: designworkplan

•   A sense of privacy: a completely private and closed off room for dinner proved to be an extremely crucial element. At one of the venues, an open section in the room allowed noise to disrupt the flow of conversation — making it feel less private and less special of a night compared to dinners that were completely closed off to the public.

At the end of the day, throwing events mean nothing if you’re not providing value to your customers.

At our conferences, we provide “Tableau Doctors” on-site that help customers or prospects with any questions about our product. Not only do these one-on-one appointments empower customers to engage with us in a meaningful way, they’ve also been the critical to driving event ROI.