Product Announcement—March 25, 2021

Recently Released

For Career Services…

Virtual Fair Targeted Email Templates

We’ve launched five new Targeted Email templates you can use to promote your virtual fairs. Vibrant and actionable, these templates will help engage students and employers.

• Review the new email templates here

New Insights Fields

When building a career fair report, you’ll now see fields to add participants' first name, last name, and email address—useful if you need to access contact information for students or employers who attended.

When building a first destination survey (FDS) report, you’ll now see an “is_internship” field. Add it to your report or use it as a filter to see which students indicated that their work experience was an internship in their FDS response.

For Students…

Relevant Upcoming Events and Fairs

Earlier this spring, we experimented with showing relevant, upcoming virtual events and fairs with students on the homepage. The modal accounted for an uptick in registrations, so we’ve decided to roll it out permanently. The modal will only appear if there are recommended virtual events or fairs for the student.

Fuel Your Job Search—Mobile Activity

Our initial, four week “Fuel Your Job Search” campaign was a huge success. We saw as high as 380% increases in students taking important actions in Handshake—like following employers and uploading resumes—as a result of the campaign.

To build on this success, we’ve launched a new campaign that will run through the week of April 5th. The campaign offers similar incentives for students who download the Handshake mobile app and use it to save jobs and follow employers.

Check out these social assets you can use to promote the campaign and be sure to follow @joinhandshake on Instagram and repost us too!

Promoting Relevant Virtual Fair Sessions

We expanded the scope of some of our emails to foster more student-employer connections and supplement your marketing efforts.

• We added a new digest email that features relevant 1:1 sessions for students at upcoming fairs.
• We expanded the audience for our “Just in time” email. This email launched in the fall and was 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 now send it if more than 25% of session slots are still available. We also send it to relevant, unregistered students too.

Show All Employers Attending an Event

When you host an event with multiple employers, we now show each employer’s name on the event page. Previously, we only showed one employer.

For Employers…

Industry List Updates

We’ve updated our employer industry list based on feedback from schools, employers, and students.

• Review the industry list updates here

Virtual Fair Reminder Email—Message Students

We’ve launched an email that reminds employers registered for virtual fairs to search for and proactively message students they’d like to meet with. It’s sent the day after student registration opens.

Coming Soon

For Career Services...

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

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

For Students…

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. Later this spring, 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.

Mobile App Interface Test

Next month, we plan to experiment with removing the “navigation cards” from the top of the screen on our mobile apps—students can use the bottom toolbar to navigate, so the cards are a bit redundant and take away space that could be used to promote jobs and events. Check out a mockup below:

For Employers…

Encouraging 1:1 Messaging

Currently, about 11% of employers who visit the job matches tab proactively reach out to students who would be a good fit for their role. We’re adding a new module to the matches page to educate employers about how it works and encourage them to connect with students.