If your institution has distributed campuses, or several career development offices, you can build Career Centers in order to manage everything in Handshake. While every campus is dynamic, below are a few best practices that can help maintain coordination and business processes as you implement multiple Career Centers in Handshake:
Establish a Basic Team
Identify a team comprised of one person from each office who are the points of contact, (decision makers & leaders).
-
Each member should hold each other accountable to speak on behalf of their School or Career Center. They should be the experts in their office and will:
- Identify and complete training goals
- Submit questions
- Provide feedback
- Understand workflow of training and questions
- Plan a regular meeting with the "core team" through implementation and beyond to check in on key decisions, updates, and team/office pulse checks
- Depending on size and nature of each office, it's helpful to use a google sheet to collect questions from each core team member.
Identify Key Workflows that Require Decisions
A few example decisions:
Who will determine security roles?
Depending on structure, this is usually the "core team" members or a central office.
-
Roles to Consider:
- Labels
- Jobs
- Employers
- Manage Students
- Mass Emails
- Manage All Appointments
- Manage SSO Preferences
Who will have access to the importer?
- Who will be responsible for importing what data?
Who will manage approvals?
- Approvals for Employers?
- Approvals for Jobs?
- Approvals for Interview Schedules?
For each, you can use filters and build saved searches to distribute the workflows
How will labels be used?
- What are the naming conventions?
- Will each office use these to filter and build saved searches?
- What are the names of the different career centres in Handshake?
- What are the career centre settings?
- Who owns the career centre branding page in each office?
- What is the pathway for a team member requesting a change to something they don’t have access to?
How will unique workflows be managed?
- If there are unique requirements across campus or for a particular office, how will these be managed in Handshake?
- Who will own these process? And any updates to these processes?
Sign-Off on All Decisions
Once a decision is made for each key workflow in Handshake, obtain email confirmation from all members of the "core team"
Prioritize Issues & Concerns:
Each member of the "core team" should be aware of the most important or most involved workflows for their office.
Most commonly, these important workflows include:
-
Check in Kiosk
- Tip: Understand the physical layout of the Career Center/use of the kiosk
- Interview Schedules
- Career Fair Registration
Typical seasonality to be aware of:
- Summer to September: Career Fair Registration
- September to October: On Campus Interview Execution
- November to December: Reporting, Preparing for Next Semester
- January to February: Career Fair Registration
- March to April: On Campus Interview Execution
- May onwards: Alumni Management, Reporting
Anticipate Busy Days & Seasons:
Situations to consider - across general campus, and per individual Career Center
- More than 30 interview schedules in one day
- Multi-day career fairs
- Large volume of events in one day
- Invite Only events - ensure the correct students are invited to these events
Technology considerations for each of the events outlined above:
- Test check-in kiosks
- Test card readers