Virtual Help Rooms for Fairs

Virtual Help Rooms streamline the fair support experience for you, your students, and employers by allowing you to set up dedicated help rooms within each fair. 

Rooms may be preconfigured, so you can share the link easily ahead of time, and quickly launch the rooms from the Session Details page to provide support to registrants and attendees. 

Virtual Help Rooms can be configured at any point before the end of the fair and regardless of the fairs "drafting" or "published" status. 

Virtual Help Room Setup

To set up virtual help rooms, navigate to the relevant fair in Handshake, then click the Edit tab in the upper-right corner of the page. From the menu on the left, click Virtual Help Room Setup.

If you'd like to offer help rooms for students or employers, or both, check the box(es) for each: 

• Yes - Offer an employer help room
• Yes - Offer a student help room

Once a box is checked, the text field will become usable. Copy and paste your pre-configured video link for the Help Rooms. 

Important: you'll need to provide your own external pre-configured video link to enable this feature, i.e. Zoom, Google Meets, Webex, etc.

Click the blue button Submit to save your changes. A green confirmation will appear in the lower-right corner to confirm the save.

Note: if you need to change the help room link, you can edit this link at any point before the end of the fair. The button appears the same regardless of the link used.

Launching a Virtual Help Room

After the rooms are configured, you'll be able to launch the assigned rooms at any point to confirm functionality.  

From the fair overview page, click on Session Details from the far right, then click Join Virtual Help Room in the upper-right corner of the page. 

From the dropdown, choose Start Student Help Room or Start Employer Help Room to launch the video link. You can also access Virtual Room Settings if needed.

The link will launch in a new tab, leaving your Session Details page open for quick access. 

Note: for employers and students, the buttons to join will appear one hour before the scheduled fair start time and disappear at the fair's end time.

Employer view day-of fair:

Student view day-of view fair:

Strategy and considerations

Our team doesn't plan to launch a help room until 30 minutes before the fair starts. Can we change the button availability from 1 hour to 30 minutes?

• The button availability is preset to 1 hour before the fair starts.
• Our recommendation is to pre-configure your video conference tool to "start" the meeting at 30 minutes till, and include a message for participants to clarify the meeting start time. 
  • You can also emphasise the help room start time in your emails to employers and students before the fair. 
• As another workflow, you can wait until 30 minutes before the fair starts to enable the virtual help room and add the links.

We are hosting a multi institution fair. Who will be able to access the Help Room? 

• The button is accessible to students across all institutions and employers at all multi-institution fairs!
• Note: only the host institution career services team has access to manage this setting.

Which employers and students can access the Help Room button? 

• Employer access: only employers that are registered and approved can access the help room button.
• Student access: any student who has access to the fair page can also access the help room button.
  

Can we use Virtual Help Rooms for the Virtual on Handshake appointments? 

• This setting is only an option for virtual fairs on Handshake.