Handshake: Improving messaging

What we did:

Handshake is the leading job platform for college students seeking a internship or their first job. As of 2024 fifteen million students use Handshake to connect them to job opportunities.

Problem:

Students needed to find the right roles with employers that matched their skills.
Employers need a way to connect to the right students (quality) while making sure they had a good pipeline to fill open roles (quantity).

Solution

We updated the UX on the candidate side to help them filter through messages, identify top opportunities, and encourage them to take key actions over passive ones.

We created smart campaigns so that employers can templatize their messaging to send to many students over different universities (solving quantity) while also filling out key criteria like skills, GPA, degree, and major to source quality candidates.

Design process

Audit

Collaborate with PM

Initial designs

Design review

Finalize designs

Bug bash

Audit

The first step was to identify pain points for the employers and candidates. This would allow us to create short term wins requiring minimal engineering effort as well larger changes that improved the overall experience.

The audit revealed that:

The process for employers to message students was long, repetitive and difficult. This would require a bigger overhaul of the employer outreach experience
Students had difficulty knowing which opportunities they had a good chance of securing a interview with and were frustrated that some basic information about the opportunity were often missing.

Ideation for candidate inbox

Candidate side

For candidates we wanted to make improvements that would help them take actionable next steps after receiving a message from an employer.

We ideated on adding:

AI generated message responses
Actionable next steps like "request an interview" or "apply" in the job description page.
Auto adding a job card when talking to a recruiter which revealed essential information like start date, salary, location, and qualifications

Improving the inbox UI to show whether someone was a top match based of meeting at least 80% of the employer's qualifications drove qualified applications for the job by 12%.

Employer side

To improve the employer experience, we identified that their biggest pain points include:

Difficulty in writing and sending messages
Reaching enough qualified candidates

To solve for this we:

Templatized employer messaging so that different members of the org can send messages. This can be reused across different jobs year after year
Improved filtering based on qualification such as GPA, degree, location, and major to target the right audience

Figma
1 product designer
1 content strategist
1 project manager
1 EM
1 data scientist
6 developers
concepts and design: Q1 2024

Next steps

There is a lot of interesting improvements we can make using Generative AI to improve the experience. I would love to be able to create outreach messages for employers using AI where the employer can add things like sentiment and tone. The trick for employers to message candidates in an authentic but time efficient way.

Learnings

This was a pretty brief project to quickly ideate and improve core features to the employer and candidate messaging experience. This project allowed me to ideate on potential small and longer term wins for a two sided marketplace.