Product Announcement—June 18, 2021

Recently Released

For Career Services…

Employer Virtual Event Check-In Data

You can now run reports to identify how many of your students attended employer-hosted virtual events! Data will be available for events hosted from June 10th onward.

• US partners can use this saved report for quick access to the data.
• UK partners can use this saved report for quick access to the data. For more UK updates, sign up for the UK partner newsletter here.

For Students…

Faster Virtual Fair Session Signups

All students can now view and sign up for virtual fair sessions without having to register for the fair first. If a student signs up for a session, they’ll be auto-registered for the fair overall (and prompted to complete the pre-fair survey, if you have one). We also promote relevant 1:1 sessions to students on the homepage. This update helps maximize student attendance at relevant sessions by streamlining the sign up process.

Homepage Refresh

We’ve officially rolled out the new student homepage to all users. The new page calls attention to important actions students can take to enhance their job search experience. We plan to use the top section of the homepage to feature a variety of tasks related to updating profile information and connecting with employers.

• The new design led to a statistically significant uptick in students visiting their career center page!

Relationships in Job Search

Earlier this spring, we announced an experiment that would show students the option to send messages to employers with a public profile who posted a job—the profile card below appears on the job posting. This feature is now rolled out to 95% of users. This update allows students to start building relationships with employers before they even apply.

• In the future, we’ll surface even more opportunities to foster relevant relationships—like 1:1 virtual fair sessions—within job postings too!

Coming Soon

Interested in learning about virtual fair updates coming ahead of back to school? Check out our virtual fair release notes for more details. We’ll share more information on these updates in the coming weeks!

For Career Services...

New Dashboards

We’re developing three new insights dashboards to help your team take action on data related to equity, virtual engagement, and employer relations.

Flags & Moderation

We’re implementing updates to our flag taxonomy to keep them focused on identifying fraud and abuse. We’re also adding new notifications for career services if an employer they previously approved is flagged.

• For our US partners, these updates were discussed in the Reimagining the Employer Trust Score session at Handshake Access—read the summary blog post here.

For Students…

Virtual Fair Follow Up Messages

Students who meet with employers 1:1 at virtual fairs are often eager to keep the conversation going. In the coming weeks, we’ll prompt students to send a follow up message after they complete a 1:1 session with an employer. If they prefer to wait until the end of the fair, students will find messaging threads pre-created in their inbox for every 1:1 they attended.

• In the fall, we’ll update our post-fair email for students to remind them who they met with 1:1 and encourage them to send a follow up message.

Mobile App Update

We’re updating our mobile app interface ahead of the back to school season—the fresh, new look will emphasize more opportunities for students to build relationships with employers.

• The updated interface will roll out on iOS and Android over the summer. Check out an early mockup of what the new jobs and relationships feed might look like here.

Parsing Public Resumes/CVs

When students upload a resume or CV, they’re shown the option to automatically populate their Handshake profile with information from the resume/CV. We’re now able to parse even more information from resumes/CVs and want to provide students with more opportunities to take advantage of this enhancement. In the coming months, we’ll offer to build out student profiles in more places that involve a resume/CV upload, like when registering for a virtual fair or applying for a job.

• For students that have an existing resume/CV on their profile that’s public to employers, we’ll automatically parse out key information like work experiences and skills so that employers can use it (aggregated and anonymized) to target their messaging campaigns. This will save students the step of having to add the information to their profiles and make them more likely to receive relevant outreach from employers.

For Employers…

Job Page Refresh

We’re updating the job page for employers to make it more actionable and easier to navigate. Updated tabs for job details, target schools, student matches, and applicants will encourage employers to connect with a wider pool of students.