Employers who do not have a corporate email domain can register on Handshake with their company's designated generic email address. A generic email is an email address that uses a domain like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, gmail.com, or icloud.com.
If you need to set up your Handshake account with a generic email address, be prepared to provide additional information as requested.
When signing up for an account, enter your organization's generic email address, just as you would a corporate email. For additional details, refer to Create an Employer User Account, Join a Company, and Connect with Schools.
As soon as you enter your generic email, a message will appear that says "It looks like you're using a generic personal email address (@gmail, @yahoo, @hotmail, etc). In order to best connect you with your company and students, please use your work email address, instead. You will be unable to join an existing company when registering with a generic domain."
Continue the registration process. Set and confirm your password, and click on the button Sign Up.
After signing up for an account, you can either connect with an existing company profile or create a new company profile if needed.
We recommend searching for your organization's name to determine if a company profile has already been created.
- If you locate a company profile for your organization and click to request to join, an error message will appear that says "You cannot join a company if you have a generic email domain. Please re-register with your company's email. If you need to use your current e-mail, you can contact support and have them manually add you." Contact our Support team here.
- When contacting Support, include your company's name and the specific location you'd like to join, if there is more than one listed. We'll then reach out to the company profile Owner to request approval to add you to the company profile. Our team can also assist with manually adding you to the company profile if the Owner is no longer available.
- If you can't locate an existing company profile, you can create a new company profile.
Note: if you will be posting household/babysitting/caretaker type positions, refer to Posting Personal, Babysitter, Household, or Caretaker Jobs.
Best Practices
Fill out your profile as thoroughly as possible.
Schools may require additional information, so we recommend ensuring that your user and company profile is as complete and accurate as possible to expedite the approval process.
Be strategic about your first school connection requests.
Only choose to connect with a handful of schools during the registration process, specifically any that you already have an existing relationship with. Avoid requesting approval from too many schools, as this can quickly lead to numerous declines.
Once you've been approved by schools, you can request to connect with additional schools later. Refer to School Network Management: Requesting, Adding, and Removing Schools.