Hi Jumbos!
I hope you’re having a good morning and enjoying the fall season. If you’re new here, #GetHiredOnHandshake is our way of spreading the word about the Handshake platform and encouraging more students to fill out their profiles and take advantage of all Handshake has to offer. Each week for a total of eight weeks, the Career Center will be re-publishing blogs that hone in on one feature of Handshake that you may not know much about. We are also hoping to spotlight some students who have successfully utilized Handshake to find jobs or internship opportunities. If this is you, please reach out to willa.mayo@tufts.edu. We would love to feature you!
This week I wanted to talk about ways to engage with the platform that will help you get shown the most relevant opportunities. Did you know that Handshake customizes job recommendations for you based on your interests? The more you engage with Handshake, the smarter and useful to you it becomes.
Many students log into Handshake without a strong sense of what they’re looking for – that’s totally normal! To make your job search as convenient as possible, Handshake ensures that the first ~50 jobs that appear on the job search page (before you add any filters or keywords) reflect their best recommendations for you. If you aren’t sure where to begin with your search, scrolling through that list is a great place to start!
As you begin to engage with jobs, however—viewing, favoriting, applying—Handshake’s recommendations will adapt to even better suit your needs. There are three primary buckets of information that Handshake uses to develop job recommendations:
- Your profile data
- Your career interests
- The employers and jobs you engage with
Each subsequent bucket of data provides a more nuanced portrait of what you are looking for, allowing Handshake to refine their recommendations over time. Take a look at this image below to see how job recommendations get more specific once you have added more information:
Let’s take a look more closely at those three buckets listed above.
⏺ Profile data
The initial batch of job recommendations are powered by a student’s major and school year. If you log in and share only these two categories, your recommendations will focus on these pieces of information. For example, if you are a senior majoring in physics, you will primarily receive recommendations for jobs in the physics field across the country that are looking to hire recent or upcoming college graduates.
✳️ Career Interests
However, you will also be prompted to share career interests —specifically job type (part-time, full-time, internship, coop, etc.), job role (researcher, data analyst, accountant, administrator, etc.), and location (Boston, California, fully remote, etc.). If you fill these sections in, Handshake will layer in recommended opportunities based on that data as well. They will also pivot to job recommendations based on inferred career interests if they notice the interests you entered seem to have gone stale. In other words, if you continuously engage with jobs that are not aligned with the career interests you originally expressed on your profile, Handshake will make note of that and adapt their recommendations to better align with your more recent activity. As an added bonus, students who share this information are 5x more likely to receive a message from an employer.
🅾 The employers and jobs the student engages with
This is perhaps the most significant and notable category. Every time you engage with a job or employer, Handshake incorporates that information into future recommendations:
- If you view, favorite, or apply for a job, Handshake will show you similar opportunities.
- If you follow an employer or attend one of their events, Handshake will show you relevant opportunities the employer has posted.
The content you engage with on Handshake provides real time insight into your evolving preferences, so help Handshake help you by spending some time on the platform and engaging with your favorite companies.
