After Grace Hopper Conference Career Fair Cancelled, Companies Turned to Untapped's Virtual Events

Less than 2 weeks ago, and only 3 days before the conference began, the Grace Hopper conference (vGHC, v for virtual this year) announced that it would be canceling the Career Fair portion of their agenda. 

As one of the largest and most prominent conferences for women in tech, this announcement left companies and candidates scrambling; the career fair was the ultimate networking opportunity, and losing out on the chance for orgs and talented women to connect was a major value loss for all participants. 

In the wake of this disappointing news, more than a dozen of our partners turned to Untapped's events capabilities to deliver over 80 successful Grace Hopper related networking events, and ultimately deliver the opportunities promised to conference attendees. 

We chatted with a couple of the partners who hosted Grace Hopper networking events on Untapped last week to hear about how it went. Daniela, University Recruiter at Coursera, had a particularly tight turnaround time. She checked in with us after concluding the last of 4 events throughout the week. 

“THANK YOU!!! Our events have had an amazing turnout the last two days. We had 125+ people in the Zoom waiting room before it even started yesterday and there was a constant stream of people popping in and out the entire event. You never would have guessed it was thrown together in less than 24 hours. Also, I had directly emailed ~600 people with a link to the Untapped event page to RSVP + a direct link to the Zoom just in case. The direct link to Zoom in my email had a typo rendering it invalid... So it was 1000% thanks to Untapped that [candidates] figured out where to go. 

We had so many attendees we broke Zoom's capacity for assigning people to breakout rooms...This has gone so much better than I hoped and all the attendees have been so excited they were still able to connect with us. This would not have been possible without Untapped!”

Nick Hernandez at Equinix had already been planning some of his vGHC events through Untapped, but was able to pivot even the integral Networking Lounge events, initially meant to be supported by Grace Hopper's virtual platform, and connect with over a thousand candidates. We spoke to him earlier this week to see what benefits he saw. 

“Thank god we had Untapped. It was super helpful to understand how many candidates were interested in us, and...the flow of candidates coming to our networking session. 

We created a talent network on Untapped, and we've been able to grow our talent network base, track everyone who’s come to our events, see our analytics, and ultimately bring everyone back for [Grace Hopper] interview days. 

I’ve worked in various tools that tried to do similar things but this one is just super easy to set up, it’s quick, and the live dashboard of automatic results is super key. I think it’s the best tool on the market. For sure.”

We were honored to be able to help facilitate so many important connections and we deeply appreciate all of our partners, and all of the candidates, who trusted us to serve their needs during this crucial week. We can’t wait to do it again next year.