The Help Center is your guide to everything Handshake! Articles are available for schools and institutions, employers, and students.
This article will assist you with understanding our Help Center and how to make the most of it!
Topics:
- Background
- Landing page
- Finding an article
- Best Practices: Finding information within an article
- Contacting Support
Background
As Handshake has changed over the years, we've changed how our Help Center is designed as well. With these changes, we've included some functional changes to improve your experience in the Help Center! We'll discuss some of these additions under the Best Practices: Finding information within an Article section.
Landing Page
When you first arrive to our help center, you'll find yourself on the landing page–our content is broken into four overall categories:
- EDU Partners: dedicated content for our Career Services users, with tips on supporting Employers and Students
- Employers: dedicated content for Employer users, can be used by CS to support employers
- Students / Alumni: dedicated content for student / alumni users, can be used by CS to support students and alum
- Integrated Video on Handshake: because of overlapping workflows, we opted for a dedicated section here. Articles about "hosting" are for EDU Partners and Employers, while articles about "attending" or "participating" are geared toward students (or if you're helping out a student!)
We'll go over the search bar in the section: Finding an article
Featured Articles
If you scroll down, you'll be able to identify Featured Articles. These address more common workflows and needs and are highlighted so you can quickly navigate to them and find relevant information.
Additional Resources
We’ve included resources that aren’t directly related to our Help Center articles as well! Some of these resources include:
- Online training hub for EDU partners
- E-learning courses for employers
- Upcoming higher ed webinars
- System Status
Recent activity
When you scroll to the bottom of the landing page, the Recent activity section will appear. This reflects all actions taken by individuals in Help Center, Handshake Academy, and Community. In the example below, a post was created in Handshake Academy, a comment was added in the Events section, and an article was created in the Events section as well.
Note: content may be displayed conditionally depending on your logged in status and related permissions, i.e. Handshake Academy and our community posts updates are only visible to signed in Career Services users.
Finding an article
Most of our partners go to the Help Center to find assistance with a task that they're working on in Handshake. In other words, they're looking for help! Thankfully, we have an extensive library of articles that can assist EDU partners, employers, and students.
Via search bar
The search bar is located near the top-center of any page in the help center. Use the search bar to look up keywords, phrases, or exact titles of articles. When you begin typing, a dropdown menu will appear with relevant articles.
This is the recommended way of finding content if you know exactly what you're looking for.
The screenshot below shows what the landing page for the help center displays when searching for an article:
Once you've found the article you've been searching for, select it from the dropdown menu or from the results page.
Via browsing
Alternatively, you can click on the category names from the landing page, then click through subsequent sections and sub-sections.
Our team has worked hard to organize and group content based on most common workflows and needs of our users, however, it's possible the strategies used won't align with everyone browsing content.
If you're clicking through and not finding what you're looking for, try using the keyword search instead in case the article is in a different section than you expected.
If you ever have any feedback regarding article placements or suggestions for new content, please feel free to surface that to our Support team, who can pass your request on!
Best Practices: Finding information within an article
As you become more familiar with our articles, you'll find it easier and easier to find information. Similarly to trying any new activity out for the first time, it takes practice to become familiar with our writing style and cadence. These tips will help you find the information you're looking for sooner!
Topics or Table of Contents
Near the top of articles, you may notice a Topics or Table of Contents listing. These will provide all the relevant main subjects of the article. If any of these terms are hyperlinked, you can select them to jump directly to the related subject.
Expandable Headers
Sometimes we'll separate information in an article under an expandable header. This makes the information in our articles easier to digest. If you ever come across an expandable header, you can select it to expand and read the information.
Example of an expandable header that hasn't been expanded yet:
Example of an expandable header that has been expanded:
Colored Notes
We use colored notes to emphasize the importance of information. In certain articles, you'll find this colored notes and different colors represent different level of urgency:
Follow content
Here’s information on this feature, as described by Zendesk:
“You can choose to follow select sections and articles in the knowledge base and topics and posts in the community. When you create a community post or comment on an article or post, you are automatically subscribed to follow that article or post.
When you follow content, you are subscribing to it, so that you will be notified by email when new articles, posts, or comments are added. You will not be notified when updates are made to the body of an article, post, or comment.
You will receive email notifications for contributions made by other users who you are following, but you will not receive notifications for your own contributions.
You can stop following content at any time.”
Contacting Support
Click on the chat option in the lower-right corner of any page in the help center (the green message bubble icon), then select the user type option that best suits your primary role in Handshake:
- Students / Alumni
- Employers
- Career Services or IT (for our EDU partners)
- please select this user type even if you are helping an employer or student!
- Our chatbot is designed to surface information from across all of the help center through this option, while prioritizing workflows unique to our EDU partners.
Upon selection, type out your question similarly to how you'd describe it in a new ticket.
The chatbot recommends steps from relevant articles based on your query, so the more precise you can be, the more accurate responses can be provided!
- Read more on Contacting Handshake Support.
- Review our Help Center Support Chatbot Terms.