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5 tips for a breezy back-to-school season

Discover back-to-school tips for engaging students and employers, automating processes, and managing data on Handshake

Back-to-school preparation can be exciting, fulfilling, and oftentimes stressful. Career services partners across the country are learning to do more with less as the pandemic continues to affect the labor market, organizational structures, and the mental health and safety of students and staff everywhere.

Our goal is to help equip our partners with the tools necessary to continue supporting learners, alleviating stress, and achieving goals—especially if your team is leaner than it once was. Check out our top 5 tips for a smooth back-to-school season!

Utilize our back-to-school toolkit

As we near the start of the semester, dive into important topics like data health, student engagement, and hybrid planning with our Back-to-School Toolkit. The toolkit resources allow you to explore best practices for:

  • Importing, managing, and customizing your data
  • Ensuring both in-person and virtual engagement are as impactful as possible
  • Engaging students early and often in their career development journey

Explore our rebranded marketing toolkit

Handshake's look and feel are getting a refresh this season and we're excited to bring you along for the ride! Our rebranded Marketing Toolkit equips you with the resources you need to:

  • Introduce Handshake to your community with flyers, posters, and an intro presentation to circulate on campus
  • Thoughtfully engage students on social media using our social media playbook and customizable Instagram assets
  • Order new Handshake swag and learning more about our rebrand through marketing tips and presentations

Incorporate two-way calendar sync to keep your calendar organized

We can’t give you more hours in the day, but we can help make sure the hours you do have don’t get double-booked. Utilize our two-way calendar sync feature to see your Handshake appointments on your work calendar and prevent students from booking appointments with you on the platform that are unavailable on your EDU calendar.

Partner with our 2022 Early Talent Award winners

Regardless of the size of your institution or career services team, employer outreach requires bandwidth that isn’t always abundantly available. When planning for employer-led workshops, recruiting events, career fairs, and more, we recommend making our list of 2022 Early Talent Award (ETA) winners your first stop.

The 150 ETA winners are leaders in Gen Z brand resonance, engagement, event participation, and relationships—and they span across 15 major industries! Whether your students are interested in accounting, real estate, entertainment, healthcare, or anything in between, this group is full of potential employer collaborators.

Signal boost highly engaged employers

Have you been wondering how you can highlight lesser known employers that you know your students would be interested in? Now, you can easily signal boost employers via collections highlighting qualities—like a great internship program, or commitment to DEI—that are relevant to your students.

There are 8 predefined employer collections currently available—we recommend adding employers to 2-3 collections maximum (you can add up to 50 employers per collection). Use collections today to guide your students to unique employers that are eager to hire! Additionally, we have consolidated data for every employer via the employer summer side sheet for you to easily identify the most active employers in your network and whether or not you want to boost them.

We hope these resources are helpful as you continue leveling the playing field for your students this fall! For more Handshake Hacks, visit our career center blog.

Level the playing field for your students