Product Announcement—September 3, 2021

Recently Released

For Career Services…

Employer Flags

We’ve launched updates to our flag taxonomy to keep flags focused on identifying fraud and abuse. We’ve also added new notifications for career services if an employer they previously approved is flagged.

• Learn about employer flags here.

Decline Reasons

When declining an employer or job, you’ll now be asked to select a reason, which we’ll surface to employers to provide more transparency around the approvals process. We worked closely with our Trust & Safety Advisory Board (made up of representatives from over 20 US partner institutions), as well as our UK partners to ensure the list of reasons was comprehensive. In the future, decline reasons will power filters that help your team make approval decisions more quickly.

• Learn about employer decline reasons here.
• Learn about job decline reasons here.
• Learn how these updates fit into our broader initiative to increase student access to opportunity here.

FDS Year Field in Insights

We’ve added a new “FDS year” field to Insights for US partners—it reflects the report year you select when setting up your survey.

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. We now offer to build out a student’s profile when they upload a resume/CV as part of a job application. In the future, we’ll surface a similar prompt when a student registers for a virtual fair.

• 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.

1:1 Recommendations on Homepage

We now promote relevant 1:1 virtual fair sessions to students on the homepage. This update gives even more visibility to your virtual fairs and helps students foster connections with even more relevant employers.

For Employers…

Messageable Employer Contacts on Jobs

When posting a job, employer users can now opt to highlight their profile on the posting—doing so will also make the employer user messageable, should a student wish to reach out. This will replace the old “share contact information” toggle on the job form. The new option provides more actionable contact information for students, and incentivizes employers to be more engaged with potential candidates.

• Learn more about highlighting employer profiles on jobs here.

Coming Soon

For Career Services...

Appointment Updates

Thanks to great feedback from early adopters of virtual appointments, we’re planning a slate of updates that will launch in the coming weeks:

• Career services users will be able to bulk email students from the Appointments page.
• Students will be marked as “checked in” when they click to join a virtual appointment.
• Career services users with two-way calendar sync enabled will see appointment medium appear as the “location” of appointments on their work calendar.
• Career services users will continue to see the “No Show” and “Cancel” buttons on a virtual appointment, even after the appointment has been launched.
• Career services users will see a button to quickly add virtual appointments onto existing appointment blocks.

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.

In-Progress Jobs Tab

We’re adding a new tab to the jobs page that will allow you to mark a job as “in progress” as you make your approval decision.

For Students…

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.