Product Announcement—February 25, 2021

Recently Released

For Career Services…

QR Code Check In—Beta Launch

You can now sign up to join our QR Code Check In beta group—we plan to launch in early March. This new feature lets you generate an event QR code that can be used to check students in. Originally devised as a way to help mitigate check-in lines at in-person events, this update can also help you easily track attendance at virtual events. Simply display the QR code on a slide during your presentation and ask students to scan it as they arrive!

• Fill out this form to join the beta group—we’ll email you when the feature has been turned on in your account.
• Read more about QR Code Check In here

Point in Time Reporting

We’ve added new insights fields that allow you to report on student actions (like submitting applications and attending events) and reflect the student’s major, minor, school year, and college at the time the action was taken. This historical data is available as far back as May 2020.

• For example, you could run a report looking at the majors of student attendees at a fair you hosted last fall.

For Employers…

Surfacing Aggregated Gender Data

Last fall, we released an update allowing students to self-report their gender identity. We now surface this information (aggregated and anonymized) with premium employers so that they can use it to target messaging campaigns to students of underrepresented gender identities.

• Sharing gender identity is completely optional for students and we surface information to students about how aggregate gender data can be used by employers
• Read more about self-reporting gender identity in Handshake here

Outreach to Students

Some students who attend employer events have a private account on Handshake, but still wish to connect with the employer. Premium employers can ask those students if they wish to share their email address for follow up—similar to collecting a list of interested email addresses at an in-person event. Those employers can now also email those students who consented to sharing their email using Handshake.

Coming Soon

For Career Services...

Virtual Fair Targeted Email Templates

We’re building new Targeted Email templates you can use to promote your virtual fairs. Vibrant and actionable, these templates will help you drive engagement among students and employers.

• Learn more about Targeted Emails here

SSO Page Updates

We’re making a few aesthetic updates to the SSO configuration page. This will not impact the way SSO works in Handshake.

• We’re updating the “I know what I’m doing” button to say “I understand - Unlock Form”
• We’re removing the hint field, which does not have any true functionality
• We’re reordering some of the fields on the page into a more logical order

Scheduled Dashboards

Building on our recently released scheduled reports update, we plan to allow you to schedule Handshake dashboards to be sent via email or SFTP on a regular cadence. As with scheduled reports, this is a great way to keep career center leadership and other stakeholders abreast of updates from Handshake.

• Read more about Handshake’s dashboards here

School Years

We’re introducing three new school years to better support students from community colleges, technical colleges, and bootcamps. Once released, you’ll be able to import these new school years via your student sync or one-off student file uploads. The three new options are called:

• First Year Community / Technical College
• Second Year Community / Technical College
• Certificate Program

For Students…

Ranking Events and Fairs by Relevance

Using a student’s profile data, career interests, and activity in Handshake, we’ve built a model that allows us to identify the most relevant events and fairs for that student. We plan to make this relevance ranking the default order on the event search page. This update will help students find events of interest more quickly.

• Events and fairs hosted by the student's school and events hosted by relevant employers will appear at the top of the page
• Students will have the option to switch to chronological ranking if they prefer
• We also plan to test showing relevant events and fair sessions on the student homepage

Promoting Relevant Virtual Fair Sessions

In March, we plan to experiment with promoting relevant virtual fair sessions to undergraduate students who have logged into Handshake via email. This will foster more student-employer connections and supplement your marketing efforts.

• We’re adding a new digest email that will feature relevant 1:1 sessions for students at upcoming fairs.
• We’re expanding the audience for our “Just in time” email. This email launched in the fall and is sent to registered students the day before a virtual fair if the majority of session slots still need to be filled. Because it performed so well, we plan to send it if more than 25% of session slots are still available. We’ll also send it to relevant, unregistered students too.

Contextual Interest Collection

We’re continually investigating ways to prompt students to share important career interest information—ultimately this helps us serve students better recommendations. In March, we’ll experiment with asking students about their job role interests while they’re on the Job Search page.

Student Navigation Refresh

Later this spring, we’ll make some tweaks to the layout of the student experience to make it easier to navigate and to call students' attention to important actions they can take to enhance their job search experience. Stay tuned for early mock ups.

For Employers…

Industry List Updates

We’re planning to make some updates to our existing list of employer industries—stay tuned for more details.