Guides

Recruiter Business Cards: What to Put on Them for a Careers Fair

AtlasLinq Team··4 min read

A recruiter's business card has one job at a careers fair: move a good candidate to the next step before they walk to the next stand. That means the card should carry the roles you are hiring for and a way to apply or book a slot, and it should get the candidate's details back to you in a form you can act on. A printed card does the first part badly and the second part not at all.

This covers what to put on the card, how to run the stand so candidates leave their own details, and what to do with the list before it goes cold.

What to put on a recruiter's card

A candidate reads your card in about ten seconds, usually while someone else is talking to them. Lead with what they came for.

  • Your name and the team you hire for. "Graduate recruiter, engineering" tells a candidate whether to stop. "Talent acquisition partner" does not.
  • The roles open now. Link straight to them, not to the careers home page, and update the link the week the roles change. A digital card is the one card you can correct after it has been handed out.
  • A booking link, if you run first-round calls or campus interviews. A candidate who books a slot from your card on the day has already done the hardest part of applying.
  • Your LinkedIn, because that is where candidates check that you are real.
A recruiter's card, read by a candidate in ten secondsYour name, and the team you hire forAlwaysThe roles open nowAlwaysA link to book an interview slotIf you run themThe careers page, and LinkedInUsuallyAn office line nobody answersLeave off
The card is read in ten seconds at a busy stand. Everything on it should answer whether this candidate should apply, and how.

Before the fair: one template, everybody under it

On Enterprise, every recruiter's card is built from your company template, so the logo, colors and company details are right before anyone opens the app, and fields such as the company name can be locked. Do this at least a week before the fair. Rolling cards out to a team walks through the order. If you run several campus teams, put each in its own department and give its lead a manager role limited to that department, so they see their own candidates and not everyone's.

At the stand: let candidates type their own details

Put a printed QR code on the stand that opens a recruiter's card, with one line above it, such as Scan to see open roles and leave your details. The card's form asks for a name and an email, and offers phone, a job title field and a message, which is where a candidate can put their course, graduation year and the role they want if you ask them to.

One setting matters here. By default an AtlasLinq QR code carries the recruiter's contact details inside it, so a scan saves the recruiter into the candidate's phone without opening the card, and the candidate never sees the form. For the stand sign, set the QR code to Web Link under QR Code Content in the app's QR settings, and switch it back afterwards. When you are handing your card to a candidate you want to stay in touch with, the default is the better one.

Every form arrives as a lead attributed to the recruiter whose card it came from, stamped with the time. Printed CVs and paper cards that candidates hand over can be scanned on the phone, which reads the contact details off them on the device, so the pile going home is smaller than the pile that arrived.

After the fair: before the list goes cold

Candidates at a careers fair talk to a dozen employers in an afternoon, and the ones who reply first are remembered. Aim to reply to the candidates you marked as strong within two days.

  • Tag every lead with the event, so next year you can see which fairs produced candidates you hired, rather than which ones you booked a stand at.
  • Move the strong ones along using the lead status in the dashboard, so two recruiters do not email the same graduate.
  • Get them into the system you hire from. Export the leads as a CSV for your applicant tracking system, or connect a CRM and they arrive there on their own.

Where this stops

An applicant tracking system runs your hiring pipeline once a candidate is in it, and this does not replace that. It covers the ninety seconds before: making every recruiter look like the same company, and getting a candidate's details in cleanly enough that your pipeline has something worth importing. Candidates are told on the form who receives their details and why, and that promise is worth keeping: use what they gave you to follow up about roles, and nothing else.

Set up your recruiting team's cards:

See AtlasLinq for recruiters → or see what Enterprise includes
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