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Best Practices: Employer Approvals

Tawnya
  • Updated

Engaging with your Employer partners is vital to building long-term campus recruiting connections. Upon making the switch to Handshake, most schools typically see a 2-3X increase in employer engagement due to the ease of use.

With this increase in volume, it's important to identify strategy up front to help you build those long-term employer connections!

Pre-invite Checklist:

If you're in implementation, run through this checklist to ensure you're ready to send the invite:

  1. Import your employer contact file (Importing Employer Contacts)
  2. Send your employers a “heads up” email (Implementation: Invite Email Examples) (optional)
  3. Determine if you'll targeting a select group of Employers (on campus, "white glove" partners, etc) and how you will identify them (How to Bulk Add Labels)
  4. Determine which team member is “sending” the invite in Handshake (Inviting Contacts to Become Users: Standard Employer Invite Process)
  5. When you're ready, send the invite! 

If you're in implementation, once you're live, you should start to see quite a few employers trickling in. This is a great time to nail down a vetting and approval process that works for your office.

 

Employer Approval Best Practices

Once you're live and working through a queue of employer approvals, use these tips to build and efficient workflow, tailored to your team's needs. 

 

Set aside time to approve incoming New Employer job postings

Why: This empowers your office to vet relevant postings, it ensures high quality, engaging network for students, and puts you in a position to strengthens and build employer relationships

Strategy:

 

Vet job postings and companies from New Employers thoroughly

Why:  Employers can post jobs to your school in order to be approved by your school. Once your school approves a New Employers' job posting, all staff who are connected to the account can request to post another position.

The time that you invest in vetting the company now, allows you to quickly scan and approve postings down the road.

The up-front approval process helps you curate an engaging network that aligns with your university's brand.

Strategy:

Use ALL of these factors to determine if the company is a good fit:

  1. Staff Member email addresses (align with company contact?)
  2. Company contact information + social pages
  3. Ensure that the “about” details align

Confirming employer information

  • When vetting employers, know that employers who have a residential address or an industry size of 1-10 are likely just getting started, so this is not usually a cause for concern. 
    • Tip: instead of simply Googling an address, try searching the company name and the address together, and this can help you validate if the address is registered to the company!
  • Please account for human error! If you see an error that may just be an oversight, such as a website that ends in ".ocm" instead of ".com", chances are, this is not a reason to be suspicious, and probably just a typo. 
  • Communicate directly with the employer about your concern/observation by adding a comment on the company profile, in the Employer Approval box, or on the job posting. The employer will receive a notification about your comment and have a chance to make the needed changes or otherwise address your concern directly. 

Industry best practices:

In addition to confirming employer information you should also note the email address attached to the staff members at the company requesting approval. Our "extra details" (yellow triangle) will help you answer these questions: 

  • Does the domain match that of the email address?
  • Is the email domain a generic one (gmail, hotmail, outlook, etc.)? 
  • Is the email domain one that nearly matches the company name, but may have an extra word in it (for example, @mcdonaldsmail.com instead of @mcdonalds.com)?

Another tipoff that a company may not be legitimate is the company details:

  • Are you able to locate more information on the company via a web search? Are there reviews of the company on peer review sites? 
  • Does the website actually work? 
    • Sometimes sites can be set up to redirect to another site–if the website loads successfully, does the address in the web address bar match what's in Handshake? 

Using this information can help you make an informed choice when approving or declining an employer. 

 

Scan + approve jobs/employers

Why: We recommend approving jobs from a variety of employers and industries (even if they don't typically align with your traditional relationships) as this give students the ability to explore meaningful careers beyond their major.

However, your office does have the final say on job approvals and can curate the network based on your institutional guidelines. This also gives you a chance to vet postings your students will access.

Reminder: Employers will be approved when you approve their job posting. Refer to Processing Employer Approval Requests for more information.

Strategy:

 

Additional Resources: Supporting Your Employers

Still curious? You're not the only one! This is a hot topic across the Handshake network, and we encourage you to leverage the insights and tips from over 500+ university partners across the country.

Handshake Community: Join the conversation

Handshake Help Center: Explore our FAQs

Handshake User Conference Presentations: Review the best practices

Handshake Webinars: