Peak recruiting season is a busy time for students, and a busy time for you! But with the right tools and processes to engage students and build your pipeline of qualified early talent, you can get more efficient and save time for your team.
Use Smart Campaigns to save time and attract students
What are Smart Campaigns?
Campaigns are the best way to reach out to a large volume of students on Handshake. Smart Campaigns are a premium end-to-end automated messaging tool on Handshake for promoting your open roles to a qualified and relevant audience.
Smart Campaigns are “smart” because they assess the new jobs you’ve posted, recommend which to promote with a campaign, and make it easy to reach a relevant audience with automated targeting. Since the most effective job promotions on Handshake are driven by campaigns, learn how Smart Campaigns help you save time and boost message engagement.
How do Smart Campaigns work?
Smart Campaigns help you find the right audience with just a few clicks:
- Once you’ve selected which open job to promote, Handshake automatically builds an audience of relevant and qualified candidates based on the key requirements from the job description. You also have the option to:
- Add additional optional filters, such as “skills,” to create an even more customized audience for your campaign.
- Add more granular targeting; for instance, if you only want to send the campaign to a niche audience.
- Not only does this automation reduce the manual workload for you and your team, it also ensures your campaigns are only reaching relevant candidates with automated targeting. As a result of your well targeted outreach, students will have a better impression of your brand.
- Plus, campaign recommendation reminders help you seize every opportunity to promote your role to a relevant audience.
It’s easy for anyone on your team to get involved with creating and sending campaigns.
Building a Smart Campaign on Handshake
8 tips for building strong campaigns
Based on Handshake data, use these tips to reduce the administrative burden on your team, and stand out in a crowded inbox to engage students.
1. Find the right students. Smart Campaigns save you time by providing an automatically generated relevant audience based on any role you post on Handshake. Then, you can choose from additional filters if you need to further customize your audience.
2. Personalize content. Let students know why you’re reaching out. Build custom messaging based on school, major, skills, or unique student characteristics such as student club.
3. Include info that students care about. According to Handshake survey data, students want to know about salary expectations (95%), essential skills (69%), and growth opportunities (64%).*
4. Highlight your employees’ voices. Handshake survey data has found that over 50%* of students want to hear about current employees’ personal experiences joining and within your company before they apply. Add an Advocate to your message to bring internal perspectives and authenticity to your campaign!
5. Keep your message short and sweet. For the best performance, keep your messages to no more than 75-100 words.
6. Be strategic with your campaign schedule. According to Handshake data, students are most active on Handshake in the evening. You can get more engagement by sending messages after 6 PM EST / 3 PM PST.
7. Use simple formatting. Plain text is best. Don’t use fancy formatting, unnecessary capitalization, or too many links—stick with one hyperlinked CTA.
8. Respond to messages. Let students know you’re monitoring your inbox and looking forward to hearing from them. As a best practice, log in to Handshake at least once per day to stay on top of your inbox and respond to candidates.
Get ready to engage!
Create campaigns to engage more targeted audiences, promote your open roles, and achieve greater impact on your early talent hiring. Get started with Smart Campaigns.
*Handshake internal study, December 2022; n=1,692