How Deloitte Hosted a Successful Online LGBTQ+ Recruiting Event

Priority: Hosting an Energizing and Engaging Recruitment Event 

The fall recruitment reception was an engaging and interactive event hosted in Kumospace, an immersive event platform. 

In October 2021, the multinational professional services firm Deloitte hosted a successful online recruiting event for advanced degree students in the LGQBT+ community. Approximately 50 students and 10 members of Deloitte's staff members attended the virtual hiring event in Kumospace, an immersive virtual event platform. 

Ethan Erickson, a Deloitte Senior Consultant and Co-Lead of Advanced Degree LGBTQ+ recruiting, organized the event. "I've been using Teams and Zoom and Google Hangout and other various different platforms for over a year. There's definitely a role for them, but for what we were trying to accomplish we wanted an event that was going to be more lively and energetic," Ethan says. To host the virtual recruiting event, connected with the organization Reaching Out MBA, Ethan and his team turned to Kumospace. 

Kumospace is distinctive from other video chat platforms because it's set in a vivid, realistic setting that mimics the real world. With Kumospace's core feature — spatial audio, the closer you are to other guests, the louder you can hear them. 

"The way the virtual recruiting event was facilitated, candidates were able to jump from conversation to conversation and room to room in a much easier fashion than they would have been able to do in other platforms," Ethan says. "We found that candidates were able to have more authentic conversations."

Serendipitous Conversations Lead to Meaningful Connections

Ethan reflects that the best connections at recruitment events often happen serendipitously, or during what he calls "happy accidents." He found that Kumospace was an ideal platform for those kinds of fortuitous interactions. 

The virtual recruitment event was organized into four different floors, where candidates could mingle with staff and get specific questions answered. The floors Ethan chose were Kumospace's pre-designed space templates — the Cafe, Office, Cocktail Lounge, and Rooftop Bar. His team gave the floors engaging names like "Talent Experience," and "Catch-All."

"We wanted to make connections with as many students as possible… and have it be as close as possible as in-person hiring events without actually being in-person — and it did feel like that," Ethan says. 

One noted favorite feature was the ability to send candidates a customized event link, which made it easy and simple for them to log on. Ethan also appreciated the Broadcast feature, in which he could speak to people across all four floors. "It was really straightforward and simple to use," he says. "It made it really easy to communicate to everyone."

Ultimately, Ethan says the candidates especially valued the ability to be an active participant in the event — and to have conversations "in a more organic way."