Student Marketing and Engagement

Marketing Kit

• UMN Marketing Kit

• Handshake Marketing Toolkit

Marketing Tips

Our goal is to give ALL students the chance to connect with the job search, networking, and research opportunities available on Handshake. To do so, we need the help of each and every career office! Students like to get information from their colleges, so we rely on YOU to spread the word. Handshake also offers a powerful opportunity to communicate with a captured audience of students. Here’s how we suggest promoting Handshake and engaging students using the platform. 

1. Add Handshake swag and print materials to beginning of year giveaways, packets, and tabling events. Talk about Handshake in orientation presentations.

2. Stock your career offices with Handshake prints and swag. Bring Handshake material to your tabling events.

3. Include these classroom slides in your presentations to students or use this ready to go 10-minute Introduction to Handshake presentation.

4. Promote counselor and advisor training sessions (held annually by Career Services Administration), share recordings of trainings, conduct your own trainings using our shared promotional material, or share the Faculty and Staff Handshake page.

5. Use Handshake’s targeted email templates and pre-built layout features to promote information (such as job postings, events, fairs, and career advice) to targeted groups of students based off college, major, labels, and more.

6. Include Handshake in your office websites by including information for how to access and login to Handshake.

7. Use RSS feeds on your websites and in your newsletters. 

8. Send personalized emails of suggested jobs or events to specific cohorts through Handshake (tip: use labels to get really specific with your student groupings)

   • Go to manage students, use the filters to narrow down a group of students, select ‘Send Email to Users.’ You can create your email and send it to that list of students.

All career offices are welcome and encouraged to use Handshake’s Targeted Email feature, found in the left hand menu, to email students and contacts that have Handshake profiles. We suggest using targeted emails for career newsletters, advice articles, and promotions (events, fairs, profile completion, mobile downloads, etc). 

Note, the UMN naming convention is:

• college - name/purpose - used for - year

• e.g., cla - career fair invitation - employer - 2020)

Suggested Resources:

• Guide on using labels to promote targeted jobs to students

• An Overview of Using Targeted Emails

• Creating and Sending Targeted Emails

• Handshake Templates

• How to download Targeted Email Statistics

About: Surveys are available to all offices for collecting information from employers and students for career fair registration (to collect additional information from employers), event satisfaction surveys (students or employers), to use with experiences, automated post-appointment emails with a survey, and more. You have the option to make a survey required for students and narrow the student audience by major and/or college. 

Find surveys under the Data section in the left hand navigation bar and navigate to the New Survey or New Survey From Template tab in the top right to create a new survey. 

Students can access a survey via an invite email or in the survey section of their Handshake experience. See how student’s experience surveys: How to Take a Survey in Handshake. Employers can access surveys through emails or forms. For either audience, surveys can be embedded in:

• automated emails (i.e. post-appointment emails)

• forms (i.e. career fair registration forms)

• custom emails via a call-to-action Button (in Targeted Emails) 

Note, the UMN naming convention is: college - name/purpose - used for - year (e.g., cbs - career fair - employer - 2020)

Suggested Resources:

• Creating and Testing Surveys

• About Survey Completion Labels

• How to Send a Survey to Employers

• Reporting on Additional Survey Questions for Career Fair Registration