Product Announcement—August 20, 2021

Recently Released

For Career Services…

Archiving Appointment Mediums

You can now archive old appointment mediums that your team no longer uses. This is especially useful if you’re using virtual appointments on Handshake and would like to retire old appointment mediums you used to promote Zoom/Google Hangout links.

• Learn about archiving appointment mediums here

Embedded Virtual Fair Support Rooms

Your team can now promote links to external virtual fair support rooms for students and employers through Handshake. After entering your external video links for student and/or employer support rooms, they’ll be promoted to each audience within the virtual fair experience.

• Learn more about virtual fair support rooms here

For Students…

Virtual Appointments on iOS

We’ve started rolling out the ability for students to join virtual appointments via our iOS app—we expect this to be live for all iOS users in the next week. Android support coming soon!

Re-onboarding

In order to serve students the most relevant recommendations, it’s important they keep key aspects of their profile up to date. Students returning to Handshake will now be prompted to complete re-onboarding—similar to the experience they went through when they logged onto Handshake for the first time.

• Re-onboarding is optional, so students can opt out if they don’t want to update their information. Students who completed the original onboarding process within the last six months will not be prompted to go through re-onboarding.

Mobile App Update

The updated mobile app interface is live on iOS and Android. The new interface emphasizes more opportunities for students to build relationships with employers while maintaining existing functionality, like access to your career center page.

Self-Reported Race/Ethnicity

Similar to self-reporting gender, which launched last year, students can now self-report their race/ethnicity in Handshake. They’ll see the option to enter the information during new user onboarding, and on their profile (Note: values in the UK will reflect UK standards). The feature is available on our iOS and Android apps. Students using a web browser will see the prompt during onboarding—coming soon to the student profile page on web.

• Students' self-reported race/ethnicity data will be stored separately from race/ethnicity imported by your institution.
• In the coming months, premium employers will be able to use the data (anonymized and aggregated) to help them craft campaigns, which help connect students with relevant events and opportunities.

For Employers…

Job Page Refresh

The updated job page interface is live for 100% of employers—the new design makes the page more actionable and easier to navigate. Updated tabs for job details, target institutions, student matches, and applicants encourage employers to connect with a wider pool of students.

• Learn about the updated job page here

Reply via Email

Employers receive an email notification when they’re sent a message on Handshake—they can now respond to that message by replying directly to the email notification. With reply via email, it takes less time and training for employers to communicate with students.

Custom Employer Descriptions at Virtual Fairs

We’ve launched a new callout on the virtual fair registration page encouraging employers to update their employer description. The description defaults to what is on their profile, but it has always been editable. This update seeks to educate employers on the ability to edit the field and attract more students to their virtual fair sessions with relevant, helpful information.

Coming Soon

Interested in learning about virtual fair updates? Check out our virtual fair release notes for more details. We’ll share more information on these updates in the coming weeks!

For Career Services...

Flags & Decline Reasons

We’re implementing updates to our flag taxonomy to keep them focused on identifying fraud and abuse, plus adding new notifications for career services if an employer they previously approved is flagged. We’re also expanding decline reasons to encompass both employers and jobs and will soon surface them to employers to provide more transparency around the approvals process.

• Read more about these updates here

FDS Reporting

We’re building a series of first destination survey dashboards to help your team more easily segment, visualize, and share student outcome data.

For Students…

Parsing Public Resumes/CVs

When students upload a resume or CV, they’re shown the option to automatically populate their Handshake profile with information from the resume/CV. We’re now able to parse even more information from resumes/CVs and want to provide students with more opportunities to take advantage of this enhancement. In the coming months, we’ll offer to build out student profiles in more places that involve a resume/CV upload, like when registering for a virtual fair or applying for a job.

• For students that have an existing resume/CV on their profile that’s public to employers, we now automatically parse out key information like work experiences and skills so that employers can use it (aggregated and anonymized) to target their messaging campaigns. This will save students the step of having to add the information to their profiles and make them more likely to receive relevant outreach from employers.

Virtual Info Chats

In the coming weeks, we’re launching virtual info chats—informal, 15-minute 1:1 conversations between a student and employer, hosted on Handshake. Virtual info chats were created to help students connect with employers in a less intimidating setting to get an inside look at company culture and available opportunities. They also allow employers to take a more personalized approach to recruiting and make a lasting impression on potential applicants.

• All employers (free and premium) will be able to offer students availability for virtual info chats via messages they send to students and, later, within job postings too.

1:1 Message Reminder

We’re building a new reminder email that will be sent to a student if they do not respond to a 1:1 direct message from an employer within 48 hours. The goal is to help students foster more employer connections by encouraging them to follow up. As always, students can turn off this notification. If a student unsubscribes from the reminder email, they are not unsubscribed from emails coming from their career center.