Handshake was created to ensure that all college students have equal access to meaningful careers. Handshake’s community includes 20 million students and young alumni around the world from 1,400 educational institutions. The platform connects up-and-coming talent with 650,000+ employers.
Initially, Handshake's student mobile product mirrored the web version without a tailored focus for mobile users, resulting in it being perceived as just another job board in a saturated market. User interviews revealed that the platform's robust event offerings and opportunities to connect with employers remained largely unnoticed, and the employer partners were experiencing low enrolment and attendance at their events.
As the lead designer for this project, I collaborated closely with a project manager, copywriter, and a team of 6 engineers. Steering a design sprint with a distributed, work-from-home team marked a unique challenge that demanded a reevaluation of tools and collaboration methods. Surprisingly, the remote design sprint not only met but exceeded expectations, delivering superior results compared to traditional in-person design sprints.
Given the high-stakes nature of redesigning the homepage, involving numerous stakeholders across the three-sided marketplace was crucial. Clear communication and involvement of leadership and cross-functional partners from the outset ensured a smooth process. Establishing redesign goals and engaging users in the testing phase were pivotal steps to guarantee that the solution addressed the diverse needs of Handshake's user base.
As the homepage of the product is a high touch and high visibility surface area the numbers of stakeholders across the three sided marketplace was high. In planning the project extra care was taken to loop in leadership and cross-functional partners early and often to ensure a smooth process. This began with a foundational step of establishing goals for the redesign:
• Communicate that the platform is not a static job board, but rather a healthy marketplace with people ready to engage.
• Help students be successful in their early career by recommending they attend events, message recruiters, and meet people on the platform.
• Show the marketplace is healthy through updated content and increased recommendation accuracy
• The experience needed a clearer visual hierarchy, as well as a scrollable homepage to suit the hunter/gatherer behavior.
Connecting with users to identify pain points as well as testing solutions was a key step to ensure that the solution we shipped served all of our user segments across the job hunt journey. Testing prototypes confirmed design decisions and lead to further refinement of others. The key insights we gained lead us to develop a phased roll out of the homepage overhaul.
Interviewing students from our user persona groups we tested various methods of prompting students to make a connection with employers, alumni and recruiters. By better understanding their threshold for risk and the value they put on personal connections we were able to build out a platform that best served our job searchers. By breaking out our users into segements we were able to customize the homepage content to serve early job hunters through to the doctoral student level of experience.
Recognizing an untapped opportunity to differentiate Handshake in a crowded marketplace, the new homepage emphasized the human connections behind every job posting. By encouraging students to build relationships with recruiters, hiring managers, and employees, we shifted the platform's perception from a mere job board to a relationship-focused hub, positioning Handshake as the go-to place for meaningful career connections.
Handshake successfully transformed into not just a job board but a dynamic platform facilitating valuable connections for students entering the workforce. The impact of the redesign was substantial:
• 36% increase in Weekly Active Users (WAU) from the previous year
• 16% rise in weekly active users on the native app
• 48% surge in mobile installs
• 10.8% lift in employer follows
