Handshake is only integrated with Greenhouse and Workday ATS. Why is that a problem for employers?

Almost every medium- to large-employer in the United States and many (most?) in other countries use applicant tracking systems (ATS), which are software applications that enable the electronic handling of job applications. These systems collect, sort, scan, and rank job applications for open positions.

College Recruiter’s employer customers tend to be large in terms of their hiring needs. They hire at scale, meaning dozens to hundreds a year with a small number hiring well into the thousands or even tens of thousands a year. None could do so efficiently or effectively without an ATS.

Some of the most popular ATS, alphabetically, are Ashby, Avature, BambooHR, Bullhorn, ClearCompany, Freshteam, Fountain, Greenhouse, iCIMS, JazzHR, Jobvite, Kenexa Brassring, Lever, Manatal, Oracle Taleo, Paradox, Pinpoint, Recruitee, SmartRecruiters, Teamtailor, SAP Successfactors, Trakstar Hire, VidCruiter, Workable. Overwhelmingly, employers want all applicants to go to their ATS to apply because it helps to ensure that all candidates are treated equally, all receive the information the employer wants them to see before and during the application process, and the employer will know the source of each application through integrations set up between the ATS and the job board or other source.

College Recruiter invests a lot of time and energy into ensuring that our employer customers are able to run reports in their ATS to see how many of their applicants came from us, how many of those were well-qualified, interviewed, and hired. If our customers know that we deliver value, they’ll continue to advertise their jobs with College Recruiter and they’ll allocate an increasingly large share of their budget to us…and they’ll be happy about that.

Some of our direct and indirect competitors are not well integrated with ATS. I suppose there are a number of reasons why, but one that seems likely is that they’re not confident that they’re delivering well-qualified candidates in the volume needed by their employer customers to hire the people they need. These competitors apparently are hoping that their employer customers will continue to spend money even if they’re seeing little to no value.

One of our indirect competitors is the career service office management platform, Handshake. At a high level, they provide job search, video interviewing, and on-campus interviewing software to hundreds of college and university career service offices, mostly in the U.S. with a smattering in other countries. The cost to employers to use Handshake ranges from $0 to try it out to $309 a month for employers who want applications to $250,000 a year for enterprise-level organizations. According to Handshake, it is only integrated with two ATS: Greenhouse and Workday. The lack of integrations poses several challenges for employers, including:

1. Limited Flexibility: If you use a different ATS, you will have to manually manage the applications you receive from Handshake, which will be time-consuming and inefficient.
2. Increased Administrative Burden: Without integration, you will need to manually input data from Handshake into your ATS. This will increase the risk of data entry errors and lead to a significant administrative burden, reducing overall recruitment efficiency.
3. Inconsistent Candidate Experience: Candidate experience can be impacted negatively as application processes may not be as streamlined or user-friendly compared to when a complete integration with an ATS is available.
4. Challenges in Tracking Metrics: Measuring recruitment metrics might be more challenging because data from Handshake would need to be manually consolidated with data from the ATS for comprehensive analysis.
5. Potential for Lost Candidates: There’s a risk of missing potential candidates if any applications slip through the cracks during the manual transfer process.

While Handshake offers valuable features, especially for employers who want to hire a small number of currently enrolled students for internships and first jobs after graduation, its limited ATS integration creates inefficiencies in the recruitment process. College Recruiter will help you hire the students and recent graduates with 0-5 years of experience that you need and also get easy reporting to know where they came from.