A career fair is an exhibition with the nouns swapped: employers are the exhibitors and candidates are the visitors. Give each its own registration form, put the candidate's field and level on the badge, send employer staff a private link for their passes, and let recruiters scan candidates so nobody carries home a box of paper CVs.
What Makes Career Fair Registration Different from Any Other Exhibition?
The money and the data run in opposite directions. Employers usually pay for a stand and want a list of people worth calling. Candidates usually come free and want to know which stands are worth the queue. One form cannot serve both, because the questions that matter to a recruiter (what did you study, when do you finish, what are you looking for) are nonsense on an employer's booking, and "how many power sockets do you need" is nonsense to a final-year student.
Campus platforms are built around exactly this split. Handshake's own setup guide has career services create registration types for employers, each with its own price and early, regular and late tiers, then approve each employer, assign a booth number and send an invoice (Handshake help centre, read 12 November 2026). Students register from their own account, and the fair can be open to everyone or limited by year, course or college.
That model suits a university, because every student and employer already has an account tied to the institution. A city council jobs fair, a trade association's graduate day or an industry recruitment show has no such directory to lean on. There you are running an exhibition, and the tools and habits of exhibition visitor registration, from free passes to the data you collect, apply almost word for word.
What Should the Candidate Form Ask?
Ask for what a recruiter needs to read in three seconds, and nothing else. Name, email, field or course, level or graduation year, and the kind of role the candidate is after will carry most fairs. It is telling that Handshake's name tag template offers a short list of fields: name, major and graduation date (Handshake help centre, read 12 November 2026). That is the badge a recruiter wants to see walking towards the stand.
Use dropdowns or single-choice questions for field and level. Free text gives you "Comp Sci", "computer science" and "CS (with a year abroad)" as three separate categories, and you will be the one tidying the spreadsheet at midnight.
On eventcloud each ticket group has its own form, so the candidate pass and the employer pass ask different questions, and every answer flows to the badge, the confirmation email, the attendee list and the Excel export. Coming soon: file-upload questions on the form. Want candidates to attach a CV when they register? Tell us how your fair handles CVs today.
How Should Employers Register?
Treat the stand booking and the staff passes as two separate jobs. The stand booking is one order from one person, with company name, stand size and the practical questions. Staff passes are per person, because each recruiter needs a badge with their own name on it and their own login to capture candidates.
The cleanest pattern is a private ticket group for employer staff, reachable only by a secret link that you send with the stand confirmation. Candidates never see it, and each employer registers its own team without emailing you a list. On eventcloud you can also restrict a promo code to named email domains, which keeps a complimentary staff pass inside the company it was meant for. One order takes up to 99 of a ticket type per line, and each recruiter with their own email address gets their own confirmation and ticket.
Coming soon: approval and invite-only registration. Need to vet each employer before they are confirmed? Tell us how your approval step works.
For the public side, list employers in an exhibitor directory with stand numbers on the event website. Candidates plan their route the night before, and a route planned in advance spreads the crowd away from the three famous logos by the entrance.
What Happens at the Door?
Two things: the candidate is recorded as arrived, and a readable badge appears. How the campus tools do it shows the range. Handshake runs a check-in kiosk where students type an email address or swipe a campus card, need not have pre-registered, and get a name tag printed automatically if printing has been configured. 12twenty's kiosk also works from a campus ID card swipe (12twenty help centre, read 12 November 2026). WebMobi's career fair page describes staff scanning a QR code or finding the student by name, with the QR code shown on a phone or on paper in place of a printed badge (WebMobi, read 12 November 2026).
On eventcloud, staff check candidates in on any phone or tablet from one link and a 4-digit PIN, by scanning the QR code or typing the nine-digit ticket number. For badges, the self-service Badge Kiosk is a laptop with a printer beside it: candidates type their ticket number (or, if you switch it on, search by name or email), check the badge and print it, and printing checks them in. More on the kit and layout is on the badge printing page.
A Form for Every Audience. Answers on Every Badge.
Delegates, speakers and exhibitors each get their own registration form, and every answer flows to badges, emails and the Excel export.
Walk-ins are a fact of life at a careers event, so plan for them. A QR poster at the entrance pointing to the registration page lets a walk-in register on their own phone in the queue, and the confirmation email carries the ticket number the kiosk asks for.
How Do the Tools Compare for a Career Fair?
The table sets out what each vendor's own pages say, read on 12 November 2026. Where a page did not cover something, the cell says so.
| Tool | Built For | Employer Registration | Candidate Check-in | Name Badge | Recruiters Capturing Candidates |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Handshake | University career services | Registration types with price tiers, approval, booth number and invoice | Kiosk by email address or card swipe | Name tag prints at kiosk check-in on Dymo label printers | Not verified this run |
| 12twenty | University career services | Not verified this run | Kiosk by campus ID card swipe | Kiosk name tags with preferred name and two extra lines | Not verified this run |
| WebMobi | Event organisers | Organiser adds or imports employers as exhibitors | Staff scan a QR code or search by name | QR code on phone or paper | Not offered, per its career fairs page |
| eventcloud | In-person business events, career fairs included | Own ticket group and form, private link for staff passes | QR scan or typed ticket number on any phone, plus the self-service Badge Kiosk | Designed in millimetres from registration answers, printed at the Badge Kiosk | Lead retrieval on recruiters' own phones, exported to Excel |
One difference sits outside the table. WebMobi's page says its plans are sized by the number of people who register. On eventcloud there are unlimited events, registrations and attendees on every plan. We count team seats, not tickets, so your bill does not rise because your fair draws a bigger crowd than last year. Registered charities, NGOs and schools can apply for free seats.
How Do Recruiters Capture Candidates Without Paper CVs?
With the same lead retrieval an exhibitor uses at a trade show. Lead retrieval comes with every seat: exhibitors scan attendees with their own phones, rate and qualify each lead, and export their leads to Excel. At a career fair the exhibitor is the recruiter and the lead is the candidate, and what gets scanned is the QR code on each attendee's badge or in their event app.
A recruiter can rate each candidate from 1 to 5, answer up to 10 questions they wrote themselves ("right to start in September?", "second interview?") and add notes while the conversation is fresh. Scanning carries on through a signal drop, which matters in a sports hall with 2,000 phones in it. The morning after, each rep gets a leads email. Candidates get something too: Who Scanned Me shows them which companies scanned them, a ready-made list of who to follow up with.
No charge from us per scanner or per lead. You decide whether exhibitors get it with their pass or buy it at checkout for a price you set.
A scan is not consent. Say on the candidate form, in plain words, what an employer receives when a badge is scanned and what they may do with it, and keep marketing permission as its own question. A scan records that a conversation happened. It does not sign the candidate up to a newsletter. The longer version is in our piece on why a badge scan is not consent under GDPR and PECR.
What Numbers Will Employers Ask for Afterwards?
Three: how many candidates came, who they were, and whether the stand was worth it. Decide before the fair which of those you can answer and from where.
How many came. Check-in rate and arrivals by hour, which also tells you whether next year's opening time is right.
Who they were. Registrations broken down by field and level, straight from the form answers in the Excel export. This is why dropdowns beat free text.
Whether the stand worked. Each recruiter's own captured candidates, in their own export. Each rep's list stays with that rep, and you see the totals across the fair, which is the figure for next year's sales deck.
Send employers the headline figures within a week, while the fair is still a recent memory and next year's planning has not started without you. Then open next year's stand booking with those figures at the top of the page.
