University Product Announcement - April 2, 2020

Recently Released

For Career Services…

Virtual Links for Appointments and Interviews

To help our partners shift their programming to virtual channels in response to COVID-19, we’ve released support for live URLs in key areas of Handshake. If you’re using virtual meeting platforms like Zoom or Google Hangouts, you can add a clickable URL to:

Appointments via the office location and appointment medium fields
Interviews via the interviewer and room fields
Events via the “Virtual Session” event type

First Destination Survey (FDS) Updates

In anticipation of schools' spring outcome collection, we’re developing several FDS updates aimed at making the tool more customizable while simplifying response collection. We’re aiming to launch these updates later in March and will host a training webinar to help your teams get up to speed on how to use them.

A “logged out” FDS link that allows you to promote your survey to students via digital channels like your website or in faculty emails without requiring them to log into Handshake to complete it.
Optional Handshake email content and optional salary questions to afford your team greater control over the survey.
Skip logic by major and college to allow your team to seamlessly integrate custom questions into your survey.
A simplified knowledge response form that your team can fill out on one page.

For Students…

Accessibility Updates

We continue to make updates to accessibility on a rolling basis. Here are a few recent releases:

We applied our standardized aria-props to our Button, Pill, and Tag Syllabus components to make accessibility easier across the application.
We now provide informative, context-sensitive page titles throughout the application, and interpolate them into our navigation bar for users of assistive technology.
We have updated custom controls (such as various buttons, tags, and collapsible filters) to provide proper information so that users of assistive technology can interact with various pages.
We improved the experience of using assistive technology in various areas of the application including using Job Search filters, adding and removing skills from the profile, and interacting with the drop downs in the navigation bar. This includes hiding components from screen readers that are not visible on the screen and removing the excessive tabbing necessary to jump between components.
We fixed some of our form components, such as the autosuggest, location input, and month and year selector, to allow assistive technology to programmatically associate the input with the appropriate label.
We implemented aria-live regions in our search to work for assistive technologies on Firefox browsers, and updated the first destination survey to use these regions to notify assistive technology of graph updates.

Following Employers

We’re testing a new module on the student dashboard that recommends employers for students to follow—the test is currently rolled out to 25% of students.

Following an employer allows students to receive notifications about that employers activity in Handshake—posting a job, hosting an event, etc. We want to surface this feature in a more prominent way in Handshake itself to further express the value of following employers to students. Eventually, we plan to surface student followers to employers to allow them to more easily target interested candidates.

Migrating Old Privacy Settings

Last summer, Handshake launched new privacy settings that allowed students to opt to make their profile private, visible to employers, or visible to employers and their peers across the Handshake network. Any student who has never logged into Handshake is automatically set to private. Any student who has logged into Handshake since the launch of the new settings was required to select from the new settings before being able to continue accessing Handshake.

Students who logged into Handshake before the new privacy settings were launched who haven’t logged in since were still using our old privacy settings. The old settings allowed you to be private, visible to employers, and/or visible to students at your school. We’ve migrated these students to the new privacy settings using a very conservative mapping model to ensure that no student is made more visible than they intended.

Coming Soon

For Career Services...

Cancelling Events

We’re building a button to let you quickly cancel an event when needed.

Appointment Check-in Kiosk

We’re planning to make a few tweaks to the check-in kiosk to make it easier for students to navigate when coming in for an appointment. These updates have been delayed by a few weeks in favor of updates that help your team move your services to virtual channels.

We’re giving a slight visual refresh to the kiosk so that it matches Handshake’s updated feel.

We’re building an appointments-only kiosk, so that students don’t first have to choose between checking in for an appointment, event, or interview. When launching the general kiosk, using the appointments-only version will be a checkbox option.

We’re adding a search bar to the drop-in appointment type page when there are 7+ options. This update will help students more easily find the appointment type they’re looking for.

Job Page Filters

To help further streamline your job approval processes, we’re building the ability to filter by work authorization requirements and OPT/CPT eligibility on the jobs page.

For Students...

Surfacing Student Followers to Employers

To expand on the updates we’ve launched to promote following employers to students, we’re building updates that allow employers to see and target students who are following them with outreach. The goal is to give students a low-barrier way to express interest in an employer, and for employers to more easily connect with interested students.

Streamlining Job Search

Our research with students shows that they regularly use the job search page to favorite jobs they’d like to apply to later. To better facilitate this browsing workflow, we’re considering ways that we can streamline the job search page—specifically, how we can give students a brief synopsis of a job description to help them quickly understand whether they’d like to learn more.

Push Notifications

Our Product Team is building four new push notifications for users of our mobile app that aim to keep students abreast of important information and encourage them to return to the app:

A new digest of relevant jobs has been created: Job digests are one of our most successful methods of providing timely relevant job information to students. This notification will let the student know that a refreshed batch of recommended jobs awaits them on Handshake.
A document was approved or denied by your school: This will be sent specifically to students who have submitted a pending application using their pending document.
Your job application was reviewed: Read more about the “reviewed” status here. This notification lets students know that a recruiter has seen their application.
A new job that matches saved search notifications has been added: If a student sets up a saved search, we’ll let them know when a new job matching the search criteria has been approved at their school.

For Employers…

Interested Employers

Mirroring the updates described in the students section, we’re simultaneously thinking about how employers could proactively express interest in students. We would then surface that information to students in Handshake. Between students expressing interest in employers and vice versa, we’d aim to create a two-way feedback loop that helps students feel more confident during the career search process!

RSVP Caps for Off-Campus and Virtual Events

We’re building an update that will allow employers to set an attendance cap for off-campus and virtual events they’re managing—this will help them set proper capacity expectations with students. We plan to eventually add a waitlist option for employers managing these types of events as well (similar to the feature currently available to career services for on-campus events). Employers will be able to suggest an attendance cap for on-campus events, but the field will be editable by career services during the event approval process.

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