Product Announcement—October 29, 2021

Recently Released

For Career Services…

Alumni Hub

Alumni Hub is now available for all partner institutions. The hub helps you build, track, and nurture relationships with your most important alumni contacts. Centralizing key data about employer users who attended your institution, Alumni Hub acts as a jumping-off point for engaging your alumni-turned-employer partners and unlocking unique opportunities for your students.

• Learn more about Alumni Hub here.
• Special thank you to our beta testers, whose feedback informed a slate of updates we’re making ahead of the launch.

“Academic/Degree Fit” Job Decline Reason

We’ve added a new job decline reason to allow your teams to designate when a job doesn’t match your institution’s academic or degree offerings. This was a highly requested update from our partners following the launch of job decline reasons.

• NOTE: We do not recommend declining jobs based on academic/degree fit. Our relevance algorithm promotes opportunities that align with a student’s career interests and/or area of study. Jobs will be surfaced to students that may be interested in them.
• As noted in our recent webinars, our long term vision is for students to be able to access all Handshake jobs and to continue to strengthen our relevance algorithms to make recommendations even more personalized.

FDS Dashboards (Beta)

We’ve built over a dozen new first destination survey (FDS) dashboards to help our US partners more easily segment, visualize, and share student outcome data. The dashboards allow your team to analyze trends across outcome types, student demographics, location, industry, major, college and more—plus, extensive filtering options will help you quickly drill down to unique subsets of your student body.

• Learn more about the new FDS dashboards here.
• The new FDS dashboards are now available for schools that signed up to participate in the beta period. The dashboards will launch for all US institutions in the coming weeks.

Targeted Email “Sending” Status

If you’ve built a Targeted Email with a large recipient list, it may take some time for the email to send. For example, an email with 20,000 recipients may take an hour or more to send. If your email is in the process of being sent to a large recipient list, the status “Sending” will appear on the email summary page.

For Students…

Additional Email Addresses (Beta)

Students at beta institutions can now add additional email addresses to their account and opt to use them to receive communications from your team and from Handshake. This feature will roll out for all schools by the end of the year.

• If you’re participating in the beta, share this help article with students to encourage them to add additional email addresses to Handshake.
• If you’re interested in participating in the beta, sign up here.

Highlighting Jobs with Relationship-Building Opportunities

We’re experimenting with new ways to promote jobs with messageable employer contacts and virtual info chats attached. We’ve launched a new banner on employer profile pages if the employer has jobs with one of these relationship-building opportunities. This experiment is live for 50% of students.

For Employers…

Job Lifecycle Emails

After running a series of experiments, we’re launching a set of emails that help employers reach more relevant students with their jobs. Sent at key points after an employer creates a job, these emails encourage employers to adopt best practices like posting to more schools and choosing specific majors to target.

• Doing this allows Handshake to surface even more student matches that the employer can proactively message about the position.

Moving forward, we’ll release monthly “What’s New on Handshake” blog posts to highlight even more new product updates for employers. Check out the October 2021 blog post here.

Coming Soon

For Career Services...

Employer and job approval re-requests

As discussed in our recent Reimagining the Employer Trust Score webinars, we’re building a new toggle you can use when declining an employer or job to indicate that you’re open to approving the employer or job if certain changes/updates are made. Your team will then be able to describe the requested changes/updates. Employers must include a comment explaining how the changes were addressed in order to re-request approval. You’ll be able to see which of your pending employer/job approvals are re-requests too.

Targeted Emails Drag & Drop

Later this fall, Handshake is launching drag and drop functionality in Targeted Emails! With drag and drop, you'll be able to easily rearrange text, images, banners, buttons, and more within your emails.

• If your institution is interested in participating in the beta launch of drag & drop in the next few weeks, fill out this form by November 3rd.

Additional Student Emails—Reporting Updates

As mentioned above, students at institutions participating in our additional emails beta can now add additional email addresses to their account and opt to use them to receive communications from your team and from Handshake. There are two main types of email addresses to be aware of:

• Institution email address: The email address your team imports into Handshake.
• Primary email address: The email address where students receive all emails that your team sends via Targeted Emails, and all emails from Handshake. By default, primary email mirrors the institution email—however, students at beta schools can change their primary email, if they wish.

In the coming weeks, we’ll roll out updates to help career services users more easily distinguish between these two types of student emails in Handshake. This includes updates to insights, where you’ll be able to build reports that include a student’s institution email address and their primary email address. For beta schools, this provides an easy way to see how many students have opted to update their primary email address.