University Product Announcement - May 15, 2020

Recently Released

For Career Services…

Want to learn more about our product roadmap for the summer? Join us for one of our upcoming product roadmap webinars on May 20th or May 27th at 10am PT.

Virtual Fair Toggle

We’ve released a new toggle that allows you to designate whether a career fair will be virtual or in-person. This option will appear when creating a new fair, or editing an existing fair. While indicating that a fair will be virtual is not yet connected with any additional functionality, it will be later this summer—indicating that your fair will be virtual ensures that you gain access to new virtual features as they’re launched.

• Read more about converting an existing fair to virtual here
• Read more about setting up a new fair here

Handshake Academy

Handshake Academy, our new training hub for your team, has launched with updating training modules on the Importer, First Destination Survey, Working with Alumni, and Marketing Handshake. Over the coming months, we’ll be populating the Academy with updated configuration and best practice videos for all of our major features that are easily digestible and trackable—an excellent resource for Handshake newbies and superusers alike. You’ll also have the ability to give feedback on courses you’ve completed to help us continuously iterate and improve on our training content.

• Visit Handshake Academy here or access it via the Help dropdown menu in your Handshake account

Login Alerts

We’re rolling out a new email alert for career services, employers, and students that notifies you when Handshake detects a sign-in from an unfamiliar device or location. The goal of this feature is to alert users if their account has been accessed without their knowledge. If the sign-in is unknown, the user will be able to change their password right away.

For Students…

Push Notifications

We’ve released three 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.
• Your job application was reviewed: Read more about the “reviewed” status here. This notification lets students know that a recruiter has seen their application.
• You’ve been added to an event from the waitlist: This is sent when a career services user moves a student from an event waitlist to the registration list.

Coming Soon

For Career Services...

Virtual Career Fair Solution

We are developing a virtual solution to replace in-person fairs that we plan to launch in time for fall. We want to understand how Handshake can change how we think about career fairs, while maintaining the same value that traditional fairs have always brought in terms of revenue, student exploration, and recruiting. We’re focusing on what you, your students, and your employers gain from an in-person fair and we’re cognizant that an exact replica over virtual channels may or may not be able to achieve the same benefits.

• Read more about our initial plans here
• Join us for a demo of our virtual fair features on June 17th at 10am PT or June 18th at 11am PT

Access to Data

Building on the feedback we’ve collected from our partners over the last several months, we’re starting to build updates to our reporting tools that make it easier for your team to tell your story with data. These updates will go live ahead of the fall. Planned updates include:

• Consolidating the data we share to make it easier to create cross-functional reports.
• Adding definitions to our data fields, so you can better understand the data you have access to.
• Adding saved and scheduled reports, so you can more easily share data with campus partners.

Employer Messaging Dashboard

In addition to the “Who’s Hiring” dashboard mentioned above, we’re also building a separate dashboard that dives deeper into which employers are messaging your students via Handshake. This will give you additional insight into how employers are using this communication channel and which segments of students are seeing the most engagement.

For Students...

Homepage Updates for COVID-19

In addition to the recommended actions module mentioned above, we’re making more updates to the homepage that help students in the age of COVID-19.

• We’re introducing a new collection of recommended employers that have been actively posting new opportunities on Handshake.
• We’re introducing a new collection recommending newly posted relevant opportunities adding a “Fresh” tag to any job on the homepage that was recently posted.

Job Digest Email

We know from our recent recruiting trends survey that students are eager to understand which employers are still hiring in the COVID-19 era. A few week ago, we sent an updated version of our job digest email to active students—in addition to recommended jobs, this email included active employers still hiring at the student’s school and tips from our Get Hired Remotely resource page. The email performed exceptionally well, nearly doubling the industry average for open rates! As a result, we’re planning to adopt this structure of job digest email moving forward.

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 save the job and come back to it later.

For Employers…

Candidate Hub

In order to help employers find and build strong relationships with interested students over time, we’re developing a new hub that will centralize student engagement information for them. The initial release will allow employers to quickly find relevant students based on the types of jobs they’re promoting, plus see which students have engaged with them (like those who have attended an event) at a glance.

• We’ve previously shared plans to surface student followers to employers—this information will be a key update to the hub later this summer, allowing employers see and form personalized outreach for students who have expressed interest in them.
• We’ll also be introducing new email digests for employers featuring relevant students based on their active postings.