Product Announcement—March 11, 2021

Recently Released

For Career Services…

Virtual Fair Targeted Email Templates

We’ve launched three new Targeted Email templates you can use to promote your virtual fairs. Vibrant and actionable, these templates will help you get students to register for your fair and sign up for employer sessions.

• Learn more about Targeted Emails here
• We’ll release templates to drive employer registration and schedule creation soon!

QR Code Check In—Beta Launch

You can now sign up to join our QR Code Check In beta group—we plan to launch in early March. This new feature lets you generate an event QR code that can be used to check students in. Originally devised as a way to help mitigate check-in lines at in-person events, this update can also help you easily track attendance at virtual events. Simply display the QR code on a slide during your presentation and ask students to scan it as they arrive!

• Fill out this form to join the beta group—we’ll email you when the feature has been turned on in your account.
• Read more about QR Code Check In here

Employer Industry Filter on Events Page

You can now filter events by the host employer’s industry. If multiple people are responsible for handling event approvals (whether within one team or across separate career centers) this filter gives you more flexibility in how you divvy those approvals up.

Adding Students to a Closed FDS

You can now add students to a closed first destination survey (FDS) via the "Add Students" button on the “Students and Stats” page. Previously this was disabled, and students could only be added via the “Manage Students” page. Students added to a closed survey will not receive any emails and only Career Services users can enter a response on behalf of the student.

For Students…

Ranking Events and Fairs by Relevance

Using a student’s profile data, career interests, and activity in Handshake, we’ve built a model that allows us to identify the most relevant events and fairs for that student. This relevance ranking is now the default order on the event search page—students can switch to chronological ranking if they prefer. This update will help students find interesting events more quickly.

• Events and fairs hosted by the student's school and events hosted by relevant employers will appear at the top of the page
• We are also testing showing relevant events and fair sessions on the student homepage

Virtual Fair Video Troubleshooting

We've added our video troubleshooting help article to the reminder email registered students receive on the day of the fair. This will help encourage students to test their video connection ahead of attending.

Accessibility

We make accessibility updates on a rolling basis. In February, we made the following changes:

• Ensured related links are grouped—this allows users to understand how the links are related to each other and allow them to easily skip past them.
• Ensured headings and labels are descriptive and unique—this gives more context to users to allow them to differentiate between similar items.

For Employers…

Virtual Fair Announcement Popup

We’ve launched a popup encouraging core (free) employers to register for upcoming virtual fairs. It will appear once to employer users who haven’t registered for any virtual fairs yet—early tests showed that employers who saw the popup were 20% more likely to browse upcoming fairs. The goal is to drive more registrations for your fairs!

• We plan to relaunch this popup in the fall ahead of fair season as well!

Coming Soon

For Career Services...

Scheduled Dashboards

Building on our recently released scheduled reports update, we plan to allow you to schedule Handshake dashboards to be sent via email or SFTP on a regular cadence. As with scheduled reports, this is a great way to keep career center leadership and other stakeholders abreast of updates from Handshake.

• Read more about Handshake’s dashboards here

School Years

We’re introducing three new school years to better support students from community colleges, technical colleges, and bootcamps. Once released, you’ll be able to import these new school years via your student sync or one-off student file uploads. The three new options are called:

• First Year Community / Technical College
• Second Year Community / Technical College
• Certificate Program

SSO Page Updates

We’re making a few aesthetic updates to the SSO configuration page. This will not impact the way SSO works in Handshake.

• We’re updating the “I know what I’m doing” button to say “I understand - Unlock Form”
• We’re removing the hint field, which does not have any true functionality
• We’re reordering some of the fields on the page into a more logical order

For Students…

Fuel Your Job Search—Mobile Activity

Our initial, four week “Fuel Your Job Search” campaign was a huge success. We saw as high as 380% increases in students taking important actions in Handshake—like following employers and uploading resumes—as a result of the campaign.

To build on this success, we plan to launch an additional three week campaign starting on March 22nd. The campaign will offer similar incentives for students who download the Handshake mobile app and use it to save jobs and follow employers. We’ll share more prebuilt social assets you can use to promote the campaign in next week’s newsletter!

Promoting Relevant Virtual Fair Sessions

In March, we plan to experiment with promoting relevant virtual fair sessions to undergraduate students who have logged into Handshake via email. This will foster more student-employer connections and supplement your marketing efforts.

• We’re adding a new digest email that will feature relevant 1:1 sessions for students at upcoming fairs.
• We’re expanding the audience for our “Just in time” email. This email launched in the fall and is sent to registered students the day before a virtual fair if the majority of session slots still need to be filled. Because it performed so well, we plan to send it if more than 25% of session slots are still available. We’ll also send it to relevant, unregistered students too.

Contextual Interest Collection

We’re continually investigating ways to prompt students to share important career interest information—ultimately this helps us serve students better recommendations. In March, we’ll experiment with asking students about their job role interests while they’re on the Job Search page.

Student Navigation Refresh

Later this spring, we’ll make some tweaks to the layout of the student experience to make it easier to navigate and to call students' attention to important actions they can take to enhance their job search experience. Stay tuned for early mock ups.

For Employers…

Industry List Updates

We’re planning to make some updates to our existing list of employer industries—stay tuned for more details.

Encouraging 1:1 Messaging

Currently, about 11% of employers who visit the job matches tab proactively reach out to students who would be a good fit for their role. We’re adding a new module to the matches page to educate employers about how it works and encourage them to connect with students.