Looking for a Job? Try Handshake.

By Collin Hall (’21) 
Editor-in-chief
Jonathan Chandra (’19)
News Editor

Gordon’s online career search program has received an overhaul; what was once “GoHire” has been replaced with Handshake, an online career-search program used by hundreds of employers and schools nationwide.

Director of Career Services, Pam Lazarakis, calls Handshake “a robust career platform which would host jobs, internships, a network, employer connections.”

Handshake, launched on May 14, is a huge improvement over GoHire in one significant way; Handshake is part of a network of businesses and institutions that would otherwise not be in contact with Gordon.                                 

GoHire required potential employers to have made contact with the college. If an employer did not know about Gordon, there was basically no way for them to be available to Gordon students via GoHire. Handshake has no such limitation.

Handshake, Lazarakis emphasized, is incredibly simple to use and guides students through quick steps to identify what kind of employment they are looking for, what kind of experience and past jobs they have had, and where they would like to find potential employment or internships. Lazarakis stressed that ease of use was a significant motivator when Handshake was being considered.

She said: “We very much wanted is for a student to be sitting anywhere on campus and to be thinking about, ‘maybe I would want to set up an appointment with Career Services,’ to not leave that spot, but to be able to open something up, reach out, schedule something, and we all know about it. The tool that we were using, though it also had many good features, did not do that.”

Student engagement with Handshake in its first two weeks has eclipsed the entirety of GoHire’s engagement in the 2017-2018 school year. During this period, the total number of unique logins stood at 503, in comparison to the 478 unique logins for GoHire over the 2017-18 academic year.

Hillary Collins-Oosting, office manager and technology support within the Career Center noted that this was “an excellent number to see in light of the timing of the launch during finals and the start of the summer break.”