University Product Announcement - April 18th, 2019

Recently Released

• Peer Messaging...
  
  • The Peer Messaging beta has officially launched to students and alumni at over 190 beta schools! 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.
  • Learn more about the feature here
  • Learn more about the moderation process here 

• Student Profile Interface Updates
  • The new student profile has been released to everyone!  Our Student Product Team has been developing a series of small updates to the student profile in Handshake.  The goal was 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.  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 the section in the students' profile for adding social media links (e.g. Github, Twitter) to make space for more high-impact sections.
    • We're also asking students what they think about the new profile via a popup window!
  • 

• 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: Handshake will be releasing more new updates to our First Destination Survey tool in the next few weeks!  Key updates include updates to the language used in our survey and invitation/reminder emails and a streamlined student experience. 
  • View all updates here
  • Watch a recording of a webinar covering these updates here

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.
  • You can review newly published documentation on these updates here!
  • If you're interested in learning more about these updates, register for our April 25th Experiences training webinar here!

• Student Job Search Page: Our Student Product Team is redesigning the student job search page.  The new design is based on user research interviews we've conducted with students to understand how we can improve upon the job search experience.  These interviews indicated that we had an opportunity to make it easier for students to learn more about a job they found via search without having to open a brand new tab.  This feature will launch in the coming weeks and we'll share a screenshot as soon as the design has been finalized.

• Premium Employer School Explorer: The employer product team is building a 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! This is a Premium feature but all employers will see the following message if they click into the Explorer tab. 
    
    • 

Wins!

• We received 197+ product feedback tickets on Experiences and 220+ for employer and job approvals that helped us rethink these workflows for Career Services.
• If you have product feedback that you want to send to the Handshake team please read through the process here. Thank you, as always, for your support!