University Product Announcement - April 4, 2019

Recently Released

• Student Profile Interface Updates
  • Our Student Product Team has been developing a series of small updates to 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've been taking an experimental approach to this project - small, scoped updates were rolled out to a very small segment of students to test their efficacy.  When we saw positive results, we started rolling the change out more widely.  The finalized version of the profile will be rolled out to all students within the next two weeks!  Key updates to note include...
    • Students can now manage their answers to career interest questions directly on their profile!  We've already seen significant increases in the number of students updating their answers, or answering for the first time!
    • We've added a My Journey section where students can introduce themselves, adding an extra personalized touch to their profiles.
    • We have new prompts encouraging students to fill out aspects of their profile like work experience and organizations.  These prompts have also led to increases in profile completion!
    • We've revived the Who's Viewed My Profile section so that students can see which employers have seen them on Handshake.
    • Due to low usage by students and employers, we have removed social links from the profile to make space for more high-impact sections.
    • We're also asking students what they think about the new profile via a popup window!
    • 

• Internet Explorer 11: A banner has been released on the student side of the product notifying users that we're phasing out support for Internet Explorer 11.  The banner links to this article, which indicates that support will cease on April 15th. 
  • This version of the browser is used by an incredibly small number of students 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

• Student Engagement Dashboard: The student engagement dashboard allows your team to quickly visualize how many of your students are utilizing Handshake.  We had several requests come in from schools to have this dashboard automatically exclude archived students - it now does!
  • Read more about the dashboard here.

• First Destination Survey: While we have more updates planned for First Destination Surveys this spring (see below), we just officially removed a question related to work authorization from the survey.  It will not be included in any surveys created in the future and for anyone filling out an existing survey from today onward.  Any legacy data from this question will still be available for reporting purposes.  This question was previously optional for respondents to answer but there was strong support from schools for not including it at all - we appreciate everyone's feedback!

Coming Soon

• Peer Messaging...
  
  • The Peer Messaging beta will officially launch to students and alumni at over 190 beta schools on Tuesday, April 16th!  Read more about the beta here.  We're also hard at work on a version of Peer Messaging for our mobile iOS app - more details coming soon.
  • Our team will be hosting weekly office hours to discuss Handshake's strategic Peer Messaging feature!  Join us on Wednesdays at 11am PT if you're interested in learning more.

• Experiences Updates: Handshake will be releasing new features for Experiences in the coming weeks!  Upon launching, everyone will have access to try them out via a toggle switch within Handshake.
  • If you're interested in learning more about these updates, register for our April 25th Experiences training webinar here!

• FDS Updates: Handshake will be releasing more new updates to our First Destination Survey tool in the next few weeks!  Key updates include more granular pre-built reporting and updates to language used in our survey and invitation/reminder emails. 
  • If you missed our recent webinar on these FDS updates, you can watch a recording here!

• 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!

Wins!

• Towson University shared that they partnered with one of their Dean's to promote the link to their First Destination Survey in Handshake to students.  The overall response rate from that Dean's college was 12% higher compared to the rest of campus!  Kudos Towson!!
  • If your office has wins like this one, please let us know!  We'd love to give you a shout out!

• As indicated above, the new student profile is driving increases in profile completion rates!  Friendly reminder that, if you've chosen to have a profile public to employers, a complete Handshake profile makes you 5x more likely to get a message from an employer!
  • The new work experience and organization prompts led 11% more students to fill out those sections on their profiles!
  • The ability to manage career interest questions on the profile has led upwards of 30% of students to update their interests or fill them out for the first time!

• We ran a small activation email campaign with 30 schools earlier this year, aimed at getting more students to log into Handshake for the first time.  The emails we sent mainly highlighted jobs that might be of interest to students based on their major.
  • Students who received the campaign were 3x more likely to log into Handshake than those who didn't!