Career and job fairs are frequently used instruments to improve the matching between employees and employers as well as between employees and professions. Despite their importance, however, their impact has been under-researched. Using an innovative dataset that measures searches on the largest platform for apprenticeship vacancies in real-time and the necessity that some fairs had to switch from in-person to virtual during the COVID-19 phase unexpectedly, we can show that virtual fairs not only had a stronger immediate positive impact on the number of searches for apprenticeship vacancies but also expanded the search radius for different professions.
