University Product Announcement - March 28, 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.
    • Last week, we rolled out a visual redesign of the student profile to 20% of users.  This update includes the ability for students to update their career interests directly on their profile.  Initial data suggests that this greatly increases the percentage of students who fill out or update their career interests!  We'll continue to test small tweaks to the profile and announce them here as we release them to larger groups of students.
    • 

• School Network Management
  • Employers now see a new design for managing their schools!
  • View details here

Coming Soon

• Peer Messaging...
  • Office Hours: 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.
  • The Peer Messaging beta will officially launch to students and alumni at beta schools on Tuesday, April 16th!  We're also hard at work on a version of Peer Messaging for our mobile app - more details coming soon.

• 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 new features for our First Destination Survey tool in the coming weeks!
  • If you missed our recent webinar on these FDS updates, you can watch a recording here!
  • For more best practices related to FDS administration, check out and follow the First Destination Survey section of the Handshake Community! 

• 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: 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 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.

Wins!

• Since the introduction of Handshake's Targeted Emails tool last fall, emails sent by our university partners have driven over 44,000 students to activate their Handshake accounts! 
  • Learn more about Targeted Emails here.

• When comparing students who received a Job Digest email from Handshake to those who didn't, we saw an 80% increase in the number of students applying to at least one job! 
  • Learn more about Job Digests here.

• Since the introduction of our Auto-approve Employer Requests feature a few weeks ago, we've seen a 50% reduction in the number of employers pending school approval for more than 5 days across the Handshake network!
  • Learn more about auto-approving employers based on their trust score here.