Institution Settings are a way for you to setup and maintain your institution's preferences in Handshake. Changes made to these settings will affect your entire institution, so you should use caution when updating them.
Some pages require special permissions (designated by staff roles) in order to update settings, so if you do not have expected access, please contact your team's Handshake administrator to request access.
To navigate to the institution settings, click on your name in the upper-right corner of Handshake, then click on Institution Settings:
For Staff with the relevant admin responsibilities, the options should be as follows (all in one list down the left hand side of the settings page):
Please find below more information on each section. This includes links to relevant articles in our European Help Centre, where you'll find more details on each area:
- Details - this includes the basic institution details, contact details and some basic configurations.
- Appointments (Categories/Mediums/Preferences/Types) - these four sections are where you will set up your appointments. We have a section with more details on Appointments here.
- Buildings - optionally, you can add information on Buildings at your university.
- Bulk Invites - this is where you can review the bulk messages you may have sent to Contacts, inviting them to join Handshake.
- Campuses - optionally, you can add information on Campuses within your institution.
- Colleges - add information here in order to be able to organise students by College.
- Course Groups - this is where you can add your institution specific courses to Handshake-defined Course Groups. These are broad groups which are usually used by employers to search for students - therefore, it's important to map your Courses to these Course Groups.
- Courses - courses will normally be uploaded via your Student Sync, but you can also manage them from this section.
- Document Feedback Preferences - here you can enable or disable Document Feedback, a feature which allows you to provide feedback to students on any documents they choose to upload to Handshake.
- Employer Approval Preferences - this is where you can set default permissions for any employer your institution connects with - for example, you may wish to allow all new employers to post jobs to your university, or may wish to restrict this.
- Event Preferences - add default instructions for event approval, to streamline your process.
- Experience Preferences - if your institution is using the Experiences feature, here you can change some basic settings, and also browse and create Experiences templates.
- External Feeds - here you can create RSS feeds that can be publicly shared about jobs, events and career fairs.
- Feature Preferences - this tab will be updated regularly with product update launches and email activation options.
- Interview Preferences - here you can add details for any on campus interview schedules, and set/update permissions that will stop students from booking slots if you'd like to restrict the feature.
- Interview Schedule Templates - here you can set Templates that Employers can use when setting up On Campus Interviews. Using Templates allows interview schedules to be easily created.
- Interview Schedule Timelines - timelines define the overall time periods for which Employers can set interview schedules. This section is where you can add and edit these schedules.
- Interview Seasons - interview seasons allow you to limit when employers are able to schedule interviews.
- Kiosk Preferences - kiosks are used to check students in for events and appointments on Handshake. You can find out more about the use of kiosks in the relevant section in the Help Centre.
- Labels - here, you can create new labels, manage existing ones and see which users have labels attached to their accounts. Labels are a very useful feature within Handshake - this guide is a useful starting point to learn more about Labels and their potential usage.
- Minors - see Courses, above.
- Office Locations - here you can add office locations to direct students when they have made an appointment with any staff member who adds the Office Location to their profile. You can also use 'virtual' office locations by adding the relevant links here.
- Payment Preferences - if applicable, you can connect with Stripe to integrate payments for Careers Fairs, Events, etc.
- Pins - many items can be 'pinned' (Careers Fairs, Events, Jobs, etc.), which will then display these items prominently in the Student interface. This setting allows you to view and manage these Pins in one place.
- Rooms - optionally, you can add information on Rooms at your university.
- SSO Preferences - this where you can adjust Single Sign On (SSO) setting for your university. This would usually be done as part of the overall IT implementation process, as noted here. The most common SSO set up uses SAML, but other options are also covered.
- Staff Management - here you can see all the staff accounts associated with your institution, along with their current roles. Selecting a staff member allows you to edit their roles and other aspects of their account (depending on your account permissions).
- Student Preferences - you can, if you wish, lock certain fields for editing, which will stop students from making changes to their profiles. We would recommend discussing this with your Relationship Manager or our Support team before implementing.
- Targeted Emails - here you can set the default 'from' name and reply-to address for any targeted emails. For more information on this feature, please go here.
- Terms - this is where you can add Term dates to organise the academic calendar. You will need to add term if planning to use the Experiences feature.
Institution Settings - Implementation Order
There's no definitive order in which you should add/update the settings, and they can of course be edited at any point, but we would suggest the following as a recommended order:
- Details
- Staff Management
- Feature Preferences
- Course Groups
- Course and Minors
- Employer Approval Preferences
- Bulk Invites
- Targeted Emails
- Campus Information:
- Office Locations
- Terms
- Rooms
- Buildings
- Campuses
- Colleges
- Labels
- Payment Preferences
- Kiosk Preferences
- External Feeds
- Document Feedback Preferences
- Event Preferences
- Appointments
- Categories
- Mediums
- Preferences
- Types
- Experience Preferences
- Interviews
- Preferences
- Schedule Templates
- Timelines
- Seasons
Additionally, if you will be implementing SSO then those settings will need to be updated appropriately. You may also wish to consider Student Preferences. The Pins section will populate as Pins are added to items on the platform.