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Product Development

Handshake Product Updates—Spring 2020

Learn more about Handshake product updates launched in spring 2020.

This spring, we released many new updates to improve the experience of career educators and wanted to summarize them in one place for you to review and share. For more information about Handshake product updates coming this summer, check out the recording of our most recent product roadmap webinar.

All of the features discussed below fit into Handshake’s 2020 product themes:

  • Foster meaningful student engagement at scale
  • Demonstrate success with self-service analytics
  • Bring the Handshake community together

Engagement at Scale

The onset of COVID-19 necessitated a rapid shift in our engagement roadmap. We quickly pivoted our plans to help schools support their students via virtual channels.

Virtual Meeting Links: We released several updates that allow you to move your in-person programming online. You can now promote clickable virtual meeting links via relevant appointment, interview, and event location fields.

Cancelling Events: As many of our partners were forced to revisit their events strategy for the spring, we released the option to cancel an event and send a customizable email to any associated employers or students.

Marketing Toolkit: We relaunched our repository of pre-built collateral that your team can use to market Handshake virtually to students. The toolkit includes social media assets, one-pagers on how to complete your profile, blog posts on conducting your job search online, and more.

Handshake Marketing Toolkit digital asset

Moving forward, our team is doubling down on our commitment to virtual engagement by building a virtual career fair solution in time for the fall. Learn more about our virtual fair plans here.

Self-Service Analytics

As a hub for facilitating engagement between your team, students, your school administration, and employers, Handshake gives you access to mountains of relevant data. Updates to our analytics make it easier for you to use that data to tell a compelling story about the impact of your work.

First Destination Survey (FDS) Updates: Many of our partners use student outcomes as a key component of sharing their value and impact. We released several updates this spring to help our partners tailor the survey to their audience and drive a higher response rate.

Employer Label Visibility: Labels allow you to add a custom layer of categorization to Handshake’s data. To make labels more cross-functional, we released an update that lets you use employer labels to filter jobs, contacts, and career fair registrations.

“Who’s Hiring” Dashboard: To help our partners access and share timely data around job posting trends, we released a new analytics dashboard to show you which employers are actively recruiting your students.

This summer we’re releasing even more transformative updates to analytics. Learn more by watching this recording of our product roadmap webinar.

Handshake Community

The COVID-19 pandemic also made virtual connections between our community of higher ed, students, and employers even more critical than before.

Following Employers: Students have always been able to follow an employer to be notified when a new job or event is posted—we think it’s also a great way for employers to understand which students want to engage with them. This spring, we started prompting students to follow relevant employers on their homepage. Later this year, we plan to let employers see and reach out to their followers.

Recommended Actions & Fresh Jobs: To give students more agency in their virtual job search and help them identify active opportunities we made two more additions to their homepage.

  • Students now see three recommended actions—follow employers, save jobs , and keep your profile up to date—that can help them stay on top of relevant opportunities and connect with employers.
  • We added a red “Fresh” tag to any job posted within the last two weeks.

Newly redesigned job card with "Fresh" tag

Coursework: Earlier this spring, we released a new filter for premium employers allowing them to search for candidates based on the classes they’ve listed on their profiles. This update expands the ways premium employers can search for candidates and helps students showcase a more comprehensive version of their experience.

We’re eager to have you engage more with our community—join our Handshake Partner Slack to connect with the Handshake team and your peers!

Level the playing field for your students