Is Handshake better for small or large employers?

Handshake is the leading career service office management platform, which means that it provides job search, video interviewing, and on-campus interview scheduling software to many colleges and universities. Almost all of the candidates using it are U.S. students searching for internships and first jobs after graduation, and almost all of those are also using job search sites like College Recruiter. Just as candidates with years of experience use multiple sites when searching for a new job, so do students and recent graduates.

If you were to talk with all of the employers advertising their jobs on Handshake, you’d surely find many small- and large-sized employers happy with the value they’re receiving from Handshake. Some and perhaps most, of course, won’t be completely happy for one reason or another. Also, I suspect that you’d also find very different reasons for why they’re happy or unhappy:

Small Employers:

1. Cost-effectiveness: Handshake offers a free plan which can be particularly beneficial for small businesses that may not have a large budget for recruiting efforts. Handshake’s own site refers to this offering as being suitable for employers who want to try out the platform, which implies to me that they know that the response rate will be little to none. The cost of advertising a single job on Handshake is $309 per month and annual plans are typically $100,000 to $250,000 a year, which is well beyond the reach of the vast majority of small businesses.
2. Local Targeting: Small businesses often need to target a local or regional pool of candidates, which can be achieved effectively through Handshake because when you post a job to Handshake, you need to select the schools at which you want the job to run. Note that the schools may not even review your request and, even if they do, they may choose not to run your posting for any number of reasons including their lack of familiarity with your organization. This is a significant problem for small businesses that don’t have the time or money to network with career service office administrators.
3. Internship and Entry-Level Roles: Small businesses often have opportunities for internships or entry-level roles, making them an excellent fit for the demographic of students and recent graduates using Handshake.

Large Employers:

1. Wide Reach: Large companies often recruit on a national or even global scale. Handshake partners with many universities and colleges across the U.S. and a small number abroad, which can aid in reaching a broader, diverse audience.
2. High Volume of Candidates: Large companies often have multiple openings and need a high volume of candidates, which can be achieved due to the large user base of Handshake. An issue that we often hear from our employer customers is that jobs advertised to Handshake tend to get few to no applications. If you’re only looking to hire a person or two per role, that’s not a massive problem, especially if you’re advertising the job in multiple places. But if you’re hiring at scale and want to hire dozens or even hundreds into the same role, this becomes a massive problem.
3. Structured University Recruitment Programs: Larger corporations often have structured university recruitment programs. Handshake aids in streamlining these processes, offering features such as virtual career fairs and employer-hosted events. In this regard, Handshake is displacing a lot of the work traditionally done by the school career service office staff, freeing them to spend more time counseling students.

In addition to the lack of response many employers tell us about, another limitation of Handshake is that it is only integrated with only two applicant tracking systems (ATS): Greenhouse and Workday. For large companies that often use complex, customized ATS systems, this could pose a challenge. These employers prefer for candidates to apply on the ATS so that all candidates are treated equally and get the information that the employer wants them to get before they apply. Also, employers spending thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with any vendor deserve to know if those funds are well spent. If there’s no integration with your ATS and so you don’t know which applicants came from Handshake, how can you justify to your manager that you spent those funds wisely?