200+ job seekers and 20+ companies: A Recap of Our First Remote Hiring Event

On December 3rd we held our first remote, and asynchronous hiring event, Oyster Bridges, for 240 total attendees spanning at least 50 countries over 24 hours.

Oyster Bridges was born out of a brainstorm on how to spend our time creating something that would be both meaningful to remote companies and also the individuals that power them.

With a focus on social good, our mission was to create a “special access opportunity” for extremely well qualified remote job seekers from the developing world to have exposure to remote companies dedicated to people-centricity.

We decided to make the event asynchronous – a new form of virtual event that does not have a schedule and does not presume any live experiences for the participants. Rather, we created a window of time during which special access was given to the event space where content and other experiences would be consumed on-demand.

Participants

Participants in Oyster Bridges were made up of three groups – company sponsors, community partners, and job-seekers.

Company Sponsors

Company Sponsors had the opportunity to share a sneak peek of their company via videos, along with assets such as company logos and, of course, open roles. Each company was represented as a virtual booth to be perused by attendees at the time of their choice.

Companies had included things such as company values, more about their core offering, and what would make a candidate succeed in the role. You can see some examples of these videos from Zwift and Actian.

Community partners

Community sponsors helped us with outreach, inviting groups of qualified individuals from under served markets to participate in the program.

Participating individuals

We had hundreds, if not thousands, of interested individuals apply to be a part of Oyster Bridges. 220 individuals registered and about 83% logged in the day of. These people joined us from countries such as Lebanon, Peru, Greece, Mexico, Brazil, and Nigeria; all looking to find their dream remote job!

Event day

The day of the event participants could join from anywhere over a 24-hour period. We decided to use Hopin, an awesome online events platform, perfect for capabilities like having an expo area for candidates to check out our various company sponsors. Attendees were welcomed to the event by Rhys Black, our Chief of Staff and myself where we walked participants through the best way to have an immersive experience, tips for visiting the jobs-booth and even an area to leave us a note sharing more about themselves.

On average, individuals spent 170 minutes in the event space looking at jobs, leaving us messages, and even chatting with each other.

Initial feedback

Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from job-seekers:

“You are doing a great job letting people from anywhere find their “dream job”. I personally want to thank you for taking in consideration people from a third world country, as El Salvador. There are people everywhere with great knowledge and intelligence, but without an opportunity, and you are giving us that. Thank you so much.”

“I appreciate all of the efforts Oyster has gone to, to close the gap and hope there will be some successes with those attending to find their next job.”“Thank you so much for organizing Oyster Bridges. The impact is certainly going to be felt years after this. It’s given talents like me a platform to exhibit our skills.”

Next steps

Continue to make matches

We will spend time connecting interested candidates with our company sponsors and hope to share success stories of hires in the future.

Share our learnings!

As previously mentioned this was our first time running Oyster Bridges, and we learned a lot. We will be sharing what we learned from remote project management, to creating virtual events, to challenges when hiring internationally and more. Stay tuned!

Thanks again to all our amazing sponsors and candidates who helped make this event a success!

Want to be included in future events? Reach out by emailing us at oysterbridges@oysterhr.com

Note: All statistics pulled from our Hopin events dashboard.

Company Sponsors

Hopin, Vonage, Hotjar, Unity, Hubstaff, Gitlab, Doist, Vinelab, Chili Piper.

RapidSOS, Everphone, Tackle.io, Actian, Progression, Getro, Outlier, Scopic, Symless, Meeshkan, Zwift, Kaedim, Notable.

Community Partners

MIT React, JobsforLebanon, Na’amal, Paper Airplanes, Codi, Remotive, Utopicode, Hola Code, Virtual Peer, Re:Coded.

About Oyster

Oyster is a distributed HR platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, hire, pay, manage, develop and take care of a thriving distributed workforce. It lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches or the expense.

Oyster enables hiring anywhere in the world with reliable, compliant payroll, and great local benefits and perks.