You can start automated outreach from the Source candidates tab on a job posting to have Handshake send personalized messages on your behalf to candidates who match your hiring criteria.
Note: This feature is not available to on-campus employers.
Who can create, edit, or stop automated job outreach?
Access depends on your employer plan and role:
- Basic: Owner and Recruiter (Standard).
- Pro: Owner and Recruiter (Standard). Representatives do not have access.
- Essentials and Enterprise (formerly TES): Owner, Admin, and Recruiter (Sourcer). Recruiter (Standard), Recruiter (Advanced), Advocate, and Representative roles do not have access.
For Essentials and Enterprise customers, these restrictions apply to both new and existing outreach. Users outside the eligible roles no longer have access to create, edit, or stop outreach, even if they previously launched it.
Open automated outreach
1. From the Source candidates tab on the job posting, click the Start automated outreach button at the top of the page.
Automated outreach is currently in open beta. Availability and duration vary based on your employer plan and whether the job is promoted.
Messages sent through automated outreach do not count toward existing messaging limits during the beta.
Review your hiring criteria
2. Review your Must-haves, Nice-to-haves, and Criteria to avoid. These are the hiring criteria Handshake uses to identify and message candidates, generated from your job description:
- On the right, preview example candidate profiles Handshake will message under the current criteria.
- To adjust the criteria, type your request into the Ask for changes box (e.g. "Add 2027 graduation year as a must have") instead of editing the lists directly.
3. Click Continue.
Customize your outreach message
4. On the Message to candidates page, review the default initial outreach message. The message includes AI personalization, which Handshake uses to generate candidate-specific content.
5. Edit the subject or message as needed:
- Enter
/in the message field to insert a candidate's First name, School, or Major, or to add another AI personalization block. - When adding AI personalization, enter instructions describing the candidate-specific content Handshake should generate.
- To remove an AI personalization block, move your cursor to the end of the block, press delete to highlight it, then press delete again.
- Click Restore default to replace your changes with the default message.
- Click Add follow-up message to create a second message.
Review and launch
6. Take a final look at your outreach before it goes live. The Review & launch page displays:
- What happens next: Messages are sent daily, excluding weekends, based on candidate signals such as engagement, profile updates, and job views. Replies appear in your Handshake inbox. Automated outreach ends when the displayed duration is complete, the job expires, or eligible candidates are exhausted. You can also turn it off from the job page.
- Duration: Review how long automated outreach will run. The duration and ability to edit it vary based on your employer plan and whether the job is promoted. If Edit duration appears, click it to shorten the duration.
- Hiring criteria: A summary of your Must-haves and Nice-to-haves.
- First message: A preview of your drafted message.
7. Click Start automated outreach to launch.
To make changes to your outreach after it's live, pause it, or restart it, refer to Manage Automated Job Outreach.