The candidate experience at job fairs hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years. Booths have gotten bigger, with more creative use of space, but the concept is still the same — attendees line up, talk to a company rep for two or three minutes and walk off with a paper brochure. If they’re lucky, they get a chance to interview in a makeshift, curtain-walled office flanked by three other candidates doing the same thing.

In this environment, candidates often don’t have an opportunity to engage with the company culture, understand the direction of the business, or clearly see the reasons why they should join.

With a key university job fair approaching in just 2 months, I assembled a crack team of three Hershey employees — myself, a graphic designer, and a university relations analyst.

Our goal was to improve in-booth candidate engagement and conversion by taking a more modern marketing approach. After a quick ideation session, we landed on an idea to experiment with augmented reality technology.

Did I mention that this was in the Summer of 2013???

In case you’re not aware, Augmented reality is a technology that uses computer vision and object recognition to overlay an experience on top of something in the real world. While this technology is not common at job fairs, we hypothesized that we could use the concept to create an experience that would excite the age demographic, while informing them of the key pillars of our employee value proposition.

After exploring a few different options, we decided to partner with Blippar, who had experience developing immersive experiences for other big brands. To save time and money, we recycled pre-approved content from our corporate communications team and did all of the design work in house. Since Blippar had never done anything like this before we were able to negotiate a favorable rate in exchange for allowing them to use this as a case study.

By keeping our team small and nimble, we were able to quickly create a high impact booth that we hoped would improve engagement levels in our brand.

To find out how it worked, view the slideshare presentation below!