University Product Announcement - March 21, 2019

Recently Released

• Student Profile Interface Updates
  • Our Student Product Team is continuing it's project aimed at updating the student profile in Handshake.  The goal is to make it easier and more compelling for students to complete their profile, and to better highlight students' best attributes.  We're taking an experimental approach to this project - small, scoped updates will be rolled out to a very small segment of users to test their efficacy.  If we see positive results, we'll begin rolling the change out more widely.  The vast majority of these updates will be interface updates only with no changes to functionality.
    • This week, we rolled out a visual redesign of the student profile to 20% of users.  This was previously rolled out to a smaller percentage of users to measure impact.  One key update to note is that students will soon be able to update their career interests directly on their profile!  We'll continue to test small tweaks to the profile and announce them here as we release them to larger groups of students.
    • 
• Employer trust score

  • To help you manage your employer requests efficiently, we have added a new feature that will allow you auto-approve employers based on a Trust Score Threshold that your school controls. 

  • View details here
• School Network Management
  • Employers now see a new design for managing their schools!
  • View details here
• New Training Pages
  • Handshake training materials and webinar schedules can now be found at https://hs.joinhandshake.com/teachme. 
• Job Digests: We've previously announced the limited release of a job digest email for students.  Students who have indicated career interests on their profiles or who are actively searching for jobs will receive job digest content from Handshake to keep them abreast of new relevant opportunities. The student will be given the option to opt out of these communications (independently from opting out of other Handshake notifications and your office's emails sent through Handshake) if they so choose.  When comparing students who received a job digest to those who didn't, we saw an 80% increase in the number of students applying to at least one job.  We're incredibly excited about the impact this feature has and are moving forward with rolling it out more broadly.
  • Learn more here

Coming Soon

• Peer Messaging Office Hours: Our team will be hosting weekly office hours to discuss Handshake's strategic Peer Messaging feature, which will be released as a beta later this spring!  Join us on Wednesdays at 11am PT if you're interested in learning more.
• Premium Employer School Explorer: The employer product team is building an new premium feature aimed at helping employers discover new schools to connect with.  Premium employers will be able to use this feature to apply student search filters and see schools where those types of students can be found.  If they aren't currently connected with the school, they'll be able to request to connect.  The goal here is to highlight unique pockets of students with relevant backgrounds that employers might not have known about previously.  We're incredibly excited about the potential this feature has for fostering new relationships between employers and universities!
• Internet Explorer 11: In the coming weeks, we will announce to students within Handshake that we're phasing out support for Internet Explorer 11.  This version of the browser is used by a very small number of student users and adds significant development time when we're looking to build new features.  This will only impact the student side of the product - not the university or employer sides.  Our goal in making this announcement is to ensure that students have ample time to start using a different browser to access Handshake.