Handshake - helping students and employers connect

by Startacus Admin

Handshake! The startup that's on a mission to democratise opportunity & help all students discover meaningful careers...

We go to school, we go to college or university, we get a job with our shiny new qualifications. That’s how it’s supposed to go. It’s how we’re led to believe it will go, anyway. The reality, of course, is that it isn’t as simple as that. It is still a struggle to find a job even when you have letters to put after your name.

Now add a global pandemic that means interviews are a little more difficult, that decreases the number of available jobs, and that generally makes things harder and more worrying, and you might end up wishing there was something, perhaps an app, specially designed just for students like you looking for a job, perhaps partnered with many different companies looking for people like you. For example.

Michigan-based career-finding community platform Handshake has launched in the UK to fulfil that wish. Starting its platform in the UK by partnering with the University of Cambridge, University of York, and University of Liverpool, with 6 more due for signup by the end of summer, Handshake is looking to replicate its success in the US, where it is partnered with over 1,000 colleges and universities, more than 500,000 employers, and has more than 6 million active users.

The platform connects fresh new talent and companies looking for that talent. All you need is a .edu or .ac.uk email address and you can sign up for free. Even students of colleges and universities that have not yet partnered with Handshake are able to sign up so long as they have this email address.

Fill out your profile, giving details about what kind of job you are looking for, location, industry, etc, and start looking. Handshake says that 80% of students who simply create a profile on the platform get a message from a recruiter; however, you don’t need to sit around hoping to be one of those 80%. The platform will deliver personalised job recommendations, and you can search through the available jobs using the usual filters to see what’s out there.

Graduates in 2020 are faced with a very different landscape to those of just last year, with different challenges, and a platform like Handshake is an advantage that could make that crucial difference for a lot of students between graduating into their bedroom to sit and worry about the future, and graduating straight into a career.

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• #students
• #careers
• #employers
• #networks

Published on: 2nd August 2020