Handshake is building a virtual career fairs platform this summer to support your Fall 2020 career fairs. With the shift towards a virtual fall, creating virtual career fair functionality and robust support has become a top priority. Many of our higher ed partners not only need to know details around how they can host a virtual career fair on Handshake, but what support will look like for preparation, day-of, and after these fairs as well.
Because institutions of higher ed are the hub for career fairs and the heart of the Handshake network, we are optimizing for day-of support to ensure hosting your virtual career fair goes smoothly and your employers and students get help whenever needed.
Proactive Support for Hosting Virtual Fairs
As with all other Handshake support arrangements, we’re here to provide both proactive training and support and day-of support for escalated situations as you host your virtual career fair.
In advance of your fair, your Relationship Manager will proactively contact you to advise and guide your virtual fair strategy and operations, and ensure you feel confident in your fair configuration, preparation, and plan.
In addition, we have a Virtual Fair Launch Kit with a variety of resources and Help Center content showing how higher ed partners, employers, and students can prepare for and utilize Handshake virtual fairs.
Day-of Support for Hosting Virtual Fairs
Support for Higher Ed Partners:
As part of proactive fair planning, we ask that our higher ed partners create, configure, and manage their own virtual fairs, as well as provide day-of support to their employers and students (more advice on how to do that is in this blog post).
If your team is unable to answer questions or resolve issues, they can escalate their questions to Handshake Support. We’re available to help with:
- Handshake product questions or issues
- Handshake-hosted virtual fair questions or issues
- Handshake best practices and product feedback
Behind the scenes, we’ll also be working to make sure your fair goes smoothly and safely:
- We're putting together resources to help you prepare and test your fair to ensure it's successful for all.
- We are developing a way to report virtual fair technical or trust and safety issues to us directly from the product for faster response.
- We’ll have a direct channel with our video provider, as well as processes in place to work with them as needed.
- We’ll be monitoring upcoming virtual fairs and work with your Relationship Manager to provide proactive consultation, and adjust our coverage to respond to anticipated volume accordingly.
Please note: there will be some issues that our team will be unable to help with because they fall outside of the scope of the Handshake product. These are good topics to think through proactively before you hold your fair:
- If your school (or an employer) uses a non-Handshake provider for video/livestream hosting, they should contact that provider for support.
- If your (or an employer or student’s) internet connection is slow or disconnected, please contact your internet service provider.
- If your (or an employer or student’s) computer, laptop, or smartphone is slow or not working, please contact your device support provider.
- If your (or an employer or student’s) camera and microphone isn’t working, contact your device support provider.
- If your (or an employer or student’s) web browser isn’t working, first make sure you’re only using Handshake supported browsers—virtual fair video screensharing will only be supported on Chrome and Firefox.
Note: Please visit the Help Center for articles on virtual fair sessions, FAQs, our support offering and pricing for more details. We will continue to build these resources as we get closer to our launch.
Support for Employers and Students:
As always, core employers and students will continue to receive email support and have access to our Help Center and other resources. In the coming weeks we will also be providing you with resources and best practices for provide day-of support to students and employers—and you can always contact us on their behalf.
Our Track Record of Success
We feel confident about our support model for your virtual fairs because of our track record of support to date.
- We’ve supported 10,000 career fair sessions across 706 schools, 408,000 employer registrations for 76k unique employers, and 2 million unique student attendees.
- We’ve seen up to 400 career fairs occurring on a given week and up to 30 concurrent career fairs happening on a single day.
- Last back-to-school season, our satisfaction rating was 92%.
Over the years we continue to learn, iterate, and innovate on how we can provide a world-class customer experience and we’re excited to support our partners in this next chapter!