Product Announcement—April 22, 2021

Recently Released

For Career Services…

QR Code Check In

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. Our beta period has ended—this feature is now available for everyone!

• Read more about QR Code Check In here

School Years

We’ve launched three new school years to better support students from community colleges, technical colleges, and bootcamps. You can now 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 made a few aesthetic updates to the SSO configuration page. This will not impact the way SSO works in Handshake.

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

For Students…

Event Reminders

Previously, students had to manually indicate that they’d like to receive event reminder emails in Handshake. In order to drive better attendance for events, we now send event reminders to students by default.

• Reminder emails are sent 24 hours and one hour before the event starts. You can see an example of the event reminder here.
• As always, students can turn off the reminder email via their notification preferences. If they choose to unsubscribe from event reminder emails, they will still remain subscribed to emails sent by your school through Handshake.

For Employers…

Career Fair Registration Language

Earlier this spring, we rolled out an update to the career fair registration page to make it clearer to students when registration hadn’t started yet. We’ve now rolled that update out for employers. If an employer registration start date has been set and the fair is published, the registration button will now say “Registration opens MM/DD/YYYY”. Previously, it said “Registration Period Closed”.

External Apply URLs

We now strip leading and trailing spaces from the job form’s external apply URL field automatically. Previously, if an employer accidentally posted an external apply URL with a space at the beginning or end, the link would break. This will help ensure students land safely on the external apply page.

Coming Soon

For Career Services...

Alumni Hub

We’re developing a new feature that helps you build, track, and nurture relationships with your most important alumni contacts. Centralizing key data about employer users who attended your institution, Alumni Hub acts as a jumping off point for engaging your alumni and unlocking unique opportunities for your students.

Scheduled Reports to S3

Later this spring, you’ll be able to send scheduled reports (and dashboards) to S3 endpoints. This will expand your team’s options for sharing Handshake data with external platforms.

For Students…

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. Ahead of a full refresh of the homepage, we’ll simplify the navigation toolbar at the top of the page:

• Remove Students and Q&A for the time being—they’re currently underutilized by students. Both features will still be accessible via employer pages.
• Rebrand Messages as Inbox

Mobile App Homescreen

Earlier this spring, we experimented 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. Removing those navigation cards led to a positive uptick in students tapping to view jobs and events. Because of this positive impact, we plan to roll this updated design out to all mobile users. Check out a mockup below:

For Employers…

Job Editing Opt Out

To help a small handful of employers with strict security standards around job postings, we are introducing the option for employers to turn off career services job editing permissions. If an employer opts out, only users associated with their company account can create, edit, and clone jobs.

• Regardless of whether an employer has opted out, schools will always be able to edit label and college requirements, apply and expiration dates, and the “interested in interviewing” checkbox.