We're making it easier for our partnering institutions to curate employer collections hand-picked by you, improve relevance to student needs, and add an extra layer of trust from your expert recommendations
Looking for ways to guide your students to SMEs and other noteworthy companies that they might be interested in? Now, you can easily ‘signal boost’ employers to collections, in other words, highlighting companies with specific qualities that are relevant to your students. Whether an employer is hiring locally, open to hiring international students, or invests in diversity, you can showcase them to students via the Career Centre homepage. Students can check out these lists of companies that are relevant to their interests, hand-picked by you using your expert curation.
Early data shows that students are highly engaged with signal boosted employers chosen by our beta partners. The “Handpicked Employers” page has been viewed by students over 18k times over the past month since the beta launch.
In the words of our UK beta tester Gary Elliott from the University of Central Lancashire:
“It’s amazing to have such a massive number of UK employers in the Handshake platform but this fantastic choice of employers may on occasion be overwhelming for students. This is where the new ‘Signal Boosting’ feature helps University Careers Services by curating employers into easily accessible groups which we believe will be instantly interesting to the particular needs of our student body. Being able to surface these groups to students directly in the platform and by Targeted Emails means that students can immediately benefit from these special collections.”
1. Use the employer summary side sheet to determine which employers to add to collections
The side sheet provides a quick overview of an employer’s engagement activity—including jobs posted, event attendance, student followers, and more. To view it, click on an approved employer. The consolidated data on the sheet helps you identify the most active employers in your network and decide whether you want to boost them.
2. Build your employer collections
Collections represent the most popular reasons your students might be interested in a particular employer. We chose them in partnership with our signal boosting advisory board (made up of representatives from over 20 partner institutions across the UK and US) and ran surveys with students to confirm they resonated.
There are 8 predefined collections, which can contain up to 50 employers each. You can select the collections by checking off the boxes the employer qualifies for and also easily remove them from a collection at any time by unchecking the boxes. We recommend adding employers to 2-3 collections maximum.
In addition, new fields have been added to Analytics to make it easy to see which employers you’ve added to employer collections. For our UK partner institutions, you can use this report to see your boosted employers.
3. View the Career Center homepage as a “student” to view employer collections
The collections you build will populate under the new “Handpicked employers” section on the Career Center homepage—one of the most visited pages on Handshake. Students can click into each collection to view the employers your team boosted, explore their profiles, and follow them.
In the future, we’ll experiment with more places to highlight your recommendations, including:
Why don’t you try to curate your first list? Add 3 employers to the collections today to guide your students to unique employers that are eager to connect with them!
