Employer Tags

Employer Tags are an approval tool designed to reduce the amount of time our EDU partners spend vetting employers, allowing you to more easily filter and identify employers who may not align with the moral/ethical/legal standards upheld by your institution.

Generating Employer Tags

Tags are a crowdsourced employer categorisation, based on: 

• selected Employer Decline Reasons: when an employer request to connect is declined by an institution, the selected reason generates a corresponding tag. Learn more in Processing Employer Approval Requests - Decline Reasons Section.
  • Note: tags are based on the clearly defined decline reasons – the decline reason “Other” will not generate a tag.

• keywords within the company profile: we’ll also generate a tag if we detect keywords on an employer’s profile corresponding to these tags:

  • Cannabis

  • Alcohol or tobacco
  • Firearms
  • Gambling
  • Third party

Employers may be tagged for multiple reasons – once tagged for a particular reason, there's no impact if they’re declined for that reason again. 

Moderated Employer Tags

Moderated employer tags have an objective definition, including an industry or practice that is evident and observable. These tags are moderated:

• Adult entertainment industry 
• Alcohol or Tobacco 
• Cannabis
• Firearms
• Gambling 
• Multi-level marketing
• Third party recruiter or staffing firm
• Employer requires up-front costs 

When an employer is declined by an institution for a moderated tagged reason (that they are not already tagged with), they will enter a support queue where the tag will be reviewed by our Trust and Safety team, then either confirmed or denied. 

• If confirmed, the tag will be added to the company profile and only visible to EDU partners.
  • The tag is not linked to or associated with the declining institution.
• If denied, the tag is removed, and the company profile remains as it was.
  • The employer decline remains in place regardless of tag confirmation or denial. 

Note: upon completion of tag review, there are no notifications sent to the staff member that processed the decline.

Unmoderated Employer Tags

There are two employer tags that are not moderated, as the nature of the reason is subjective, or open to interpretation per institution. When an employer is declined for these reasons, they are automatically tagged without input from Handshake’s Trust & Safety team.

• Ideological / religious objection to industry 
• Employer does not comply with legal guidelines 

Auto-approval settings

Institutions that choose to use Handshake's auto-approval feature can select Employer Tag exceptions.

Requests from employers are set to pending if they are tagged with one of the selected tags, allowing your team to further review the request.

For steps to configure or update employer auto-approval settings, refer to Institution Settings: Auto-approving Employer Requests.

For additional insight and access to upcoming office hours, check out our blog post Automation tools streamline employer and job approvals!