Once a year isn’t enough: Why universities are turning to virtual career fairs
The annual career fair works. It just does not work often enough.
Over the past few weeks, we visited a number of universities to introduce Anaanse, a platform that helps universities manage their career centers and connect students with employers.
Our conversations were meant to cover the bigger picture: how universities structure career services, track engagement, and build lasting employer relationships. Before we could get into the broader discussion, almost every university kept returning to one thing: virtual career fairs.
It was not hard to understand why once we heard how they talked about the ones they already run.
The physical career fair has a ceiling
Physical career fairs remain important. Universities invest in them, students show up for them, and employers value the face time they provide.
But the effort required to run one is significant: venues, employer coordination, student registration, day-of logistics, all managed by career teams that are often already stretched. That limits how often they can realistically happen.
The result is a calendar with one, sometimes two, career fairs a year and long quiet stretches in between. For students and employers who operate on different timelines, those gaps add up.
And in room after room, universities were already thinking about how to close them.
What kept coming up in every room
When universities saw the virtual career fair feature inside Anaanse, the question was almost always the same: "Can we actually run one of those?"
It was not about novelty. It was about what it would allow them to do: run more events, more often, without the same overhead each time.
The picture that emerged across conversations was consistent. Keep the physical fair for in-person presence, and use virtual career fairs to maintain engagement in between. Not a replacement. A complement that makes the overall calendar more active.
A shift already happening
Virtual career fairs are not a new concept. Institutions across the world already run them as a regular part of how they connect students with employers. Locally, some universities have quietly started doing the same.
What is changing is the appetite. More institutions are asking the question, exploring what it would look like in their context, and realising the barrier to getting started is lower than they assumed.
That is exactly the gap Anaanse was built to close. If your institution is ready to move beyond the annual fair, reach out to us for a demo at hello@anaanse.com or visit anaanse.com.
