Third-Party Recruiters in Handshake

In our continual effort to enhance trust and safety for our students and higher education partners, we perform regular audits of our job postings to ensure third parties are not posting job opportunities that redirect your students to another site and require students to setup a third-party account.

We perform these audits because occasionally companies post jobs on Handshake in order to acquire student users to their platform - asking students to leave Handshake and sign up for their platform in order to see and apply for the opportunities they post. 

More concerning is what happens after the student creates an account on the third-party site: the third-party recruiters then use the students’ email addresses to re-market the students to other employers without the students’ explicit consent. In some cases, these sites then sell the email addresses of those students. Additionally, because this activity is happening on third-party platforms, you and your teams lose access to the data and insights about the students' career journeys once they leave the Handshake platform. 

Handshake is committed to offering as many career opportunities as possible to students directly in our product, where we can ensure the highest levels of trust and safety. We seek to remove barriers to access opportunities, not create more barriers for the students on our platform. This is why we don't allow third party recruiters (or anyone else) to require students to create an account on a third-party site in another platform in order to access a job.

Specifically, our Terms of Service, listed more fully below, include the following “Third Party Recruiter Guidelines”: 

“Handshake is excited to offer as many career opportunities to students as possible, including those offered by third party recruiters. However, we do not permit outside services from bulk collecting student data, employer data, job descriptions, or other marketplace information through the use of automated scripts (“scraping”) or similar technologies or methodologies. Third party recruiters are also prohibited from requiring students to create an account on a third-party platform unaffiliated with the company or brand providing the employment role. Any violation of these, or any other Terms, at our discretion, may result in suspension or termination of the account(s) associated with you or your recruitment service.”

We’ve asked these companies to abide by our Terms of Service like all other employer partners. In some cases, those we spoke to were able to comply with our Terms of Service by agreeing to only post their own internal jobs on Handshake. In other cases, third-party recruiters were able to comply by eliminating the requirement for third party account creation (meaning the student’s application would only be shown to the employer who specifically posted the job in question).

We welcome the continued partnership of every employer, including third-party recruiters, as long as it is in compliance with our standards for trust and security of all student and higher education partners.

Here are the full terms of service for third-party recruiters: 

Third Party Recruiter Guidelines

Handshake is excited to offer as many career opportunities to Students as possible, including those offered by third party recruiters. However, we do not permit outside services to collect Student data, employer data, job descriptions, or other marketplace information in bulk through the use of automated scripts (“scraping”), or similar or other technologies or methodologies. To protect our users and their data privacy, moreover, you may not use the data of students or other users for the purpose of marketing any employment opportunities other than the opportunity the applicant applied to through the Handshake Service.  For the same reason, you may not store any student’s or other user’s data for the purpose of (1) marketing employment opportunities to the applicant in the future; or (2) allowing any third party to use the data for marketing or any other reason.  Third party recruiters are also prohibited from requiring Students to create an account on a third-party platform unaffiliated with the company or brand providing the employment role. Any violation of these or any other Terms, at our discretion, may result in suspension or termination of the account(s) associated with you or your recruitment service.