Product Announcement—January 14, 2021

Recently Released

For Career Services…

Scheduled Reports

We’ve launched scheduled reports to a small beta group of testers—it will roll out to everyone in the coming weeks. This feature lets you schedule reports to be sent to external systems or stakeholders as an image, PDF, or CSV. This update will help you showcase the outcomes of your work with other team members and institutional leaders.

• Read more about scheduled reports here
• If you’re interested in beta testing, please discuss participating with your team. Then, fill out this form!

Dashboard Updates

We’ve tweaked the data flowing into some of our dashboards.

• We updated peer comparison metrics on the Student Engagement Dashboard, resolving an issue where schools saw no data there.
• The weekly appointments graph on the Appointments Dashboard now includes drop-ins.

Virtual Fair Target Audience Data

We’ve released three new fields on the virtual fair creation form—target student attendee count, target employer attendee count, and target industries.

• The target attendee information will help us better track your progress toward student and employer registration goals and establish more network-wide benchmarks.
• We plan to use target industry information to promote the fair via email to relevant employers later this spring. We will not recommend a fair if it is invite only.

Host/Owner Filters on Events Page

When using the host or owner filter on the Events page, confusion can arise if there is a school and an employer with the same name. To make it easier to differentiate, the suffix "(School)" has been added to all schools on the list.

For Students…

Career Interests in Real Time

When students log into Handshake for the first time, they complete a series of onboarding questions to populate their profiles and collect career interests. The information we collect in onboarding will now immediately impact the job recommendations we show the student, rather than taking a short time to be reflected. This change has been rolled out for 100% of students.

Job Role Filter

We’ve replaced the existing job function filter with a job role filter on the job search page. This will make the filters more consistent with the rest of Handshake, where job roles are used regularly.

• Learn about why we use job roles here

Filter Sessions by Time

Students can now use a time filter to identify available virtual fair sessions during open slots in their schedule.

Promoting Resume Uploads in Virtual Fairs

Employers are able to see public resumes of students who have signed up for their fair sessions. We've added a static reminder to students to upload a new resume (or refresh an old one) ahead of the fair. Students do not have to upload a resume or make it public if they do not wish to do so.

For Employers…

Automatic Job Role Tagging

When employers create a new job in Handshake, they’re asked to tag job roles to categorize the opportunity—this makes it easier for Handshake to recommend the opportunity to students. We’ve released an update that automatically tags job roles on behalf of the employer. This allows employers to post jobs more quickly, and will lead to better job recommendations for students.

• Job roles will be tagged once the posting is created—employers will be able to view and edit the tagged job roles from the job page. Career services can also edit tagged job roles.

Coming Soon

For Career Services...

QR Code Check In

In the coming weeks you’ll be able to 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!

For Students…

Personal Email Support

We plan to allow students to share a personal email address that they’d like to use to receive emails from Handshake. This personal email would also be accessible to career services—a helpful way to stay in touch with students after they graduate.

“Fuel Your Job Search” Campaign

In February, we’re running an email campaign for activated undergraduate students promoting important actions like following employers and saving jobs that help them get better recommendations.

• We’ll announce the campaign during the last week of January via email and our social channels.
• On Mondays in February, we’ll send an email promoting a new action to complete in Handshake. 25 students who take the action that week will be selected to receive a $50 gift card from a food delivery service.
• We highly encourage you to promote this campaign to students using your own marketing channels as well. We’ll share resources to do so in a future newsletter. For now, check out an example email mockup (design subject to change) below:

Student Homepage Refresh

In the coming weeks, we’ll make some visual updates to the layout of the student homepage to make it easier to navigate. Stay tuned for early mock ups.

Promoting Resume Uploads in Virtual Fairs

Building on our update reminding students to have an up-to-date resume ahead of attending a fair, we're adding a prompt to upload a resume after a student signs up for a session.

Updated Registration Page Language

If a fair is public to students but the student registration period hasn't started yet, the language on the page can be misinterpreted to suggest that students missed their opportunity to sign up. We're updating the language so that it's clearer that registration will open in the future.

For Employers…

Your Candidates

We’re building a new tab in the Candidate Hub for premium employers. The “Your Candidates” page will be populated by students who have interacted with the employer in the past—students that follow the employer, have attended events, applied for jobs, and more. This will allow employers to better keep track of students over time and stay connected.

• In the future, we plan to build a version of “Your Candidates” for core (free) employers that will share some of this engagement information as well.

Managing Virtual Fair Sessions

We’re adding more virtual fair schedule editing options to the Manage Sessions dropdown menu. Soon, employers will see options to “Add a New Teammate” and “Add a New 1:1 Schedule”. As with other editing options, employers will be able to take these actions before or during a fair.

To make schedule editing easier, we’re also splitting available editing options into two dropdown menus—"Manage Team" and "Manage Sessions". They'll sit next to each other on the page. "Manage Team" will allow you to invite a new team member, and remove or transfer a schedule. "Manage Sessions" will allow you to create or edit group and 1:1 sessions.

Industry List Updates

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

Outreach to Students

Some students who attend employer events have a private account on Handshake, but still wish to connect with the employer. Premium employers currently have the ability to ask those students if they wish to share their email address for follow up—similar to collecting a list of interested email addresses at an in-person event. This update will allow employers to email those students who consented to sharing their email using Handshake.