Emma Davis, Features Editor

This fall, the Gordon Career Center is unveiling Handshake, its new recruiting platform, replacing Career Drive. The site is a career-managing platform to search for internship, job, and graduate school opportunities.

The use of Handshake was first announced through email on June 21.

“Great News!” Sharon Belden Castonguay, Director of the Gordon Career Center, wrote in a campus-wide email. “The Gordon Career Center at Wesleyan University has partnered with Handshake—a modern and mobile career development platform that has replaced our old system, CareerDrive.”

Handshake is relatively new, but it has already made a major impact on university campuses. According to an overview of Handshake from their website, it was launched in 2014.

“[Handshake] makes it easy for any student to find the right job, no matter where they go to school, what they major in, or who they know,” the website reads. “With 150+ U.S. universities, 2.5 million student profiles, and 120,000 recruiters from 70,000 companies (including 100% of the Fortune 100) posting over 400,000 job opportunities to-date, Handshake transforms the recruiting experience for students, recruiters, and university career centers.”

Castonguay believes that adopting Handshake is a big step in the right direction for the Career Center. In her opinion, the chief benefit of using Handshake over CareerDrive is its user-friendly and easy-to-navigate interface.

“I have worked with all the major career management platforms over the years, and this is the first one in a long time that truly offers a different user experience, for both the student and the employer,” Castonguay said in an email to The Argus. “Some of the innovative features include machine learning algorithms that, over time, will result in students seeing jobs and internships most relevant to their career interests as soon as they log in. In addition, the employer interface makes it easier for recruiters to source talent at multiple schools, which has already resulted in a big increase in job and internship postings for us—even from companies with which we have never had recruiting relationships.”

Compared to CareerDrive, Handshake is reportedly easier to use on the employer end as well, which in turn leads to more job and internship postings that University students may access. Additionally, a benefit to using Handshake is that students will retain access to it even after graduation, unlike Career Drive.

Employers who are posting positions on Handshake are more expansive about who they are including in their parameters, which means that there will be available listings geared toward recent graduates as well as current undergraduates.

Handshake also remembers preferences and interests from previous searches and anticipates the kinds of internships and jobs that the user would likely want to pursue.

Yet another benefit to the switch is the ability to schedule appointments and meetings in the Career Center, making it easier for students to sign up to get their resumes peer-edited and approved by Career Center advisors. The ease of making meetings is also beneficial for pre-med, pre-law,  pre-business and all students who want to be advised on how to help their career dreams come to fruition.

Another Career Center initiative released in tandem with Handshake is the Careers by Design seminar, a new career education program led by the Gordon Career Center.

“[The Careers by Design seminar] encourages students to design their own careers by exploring the intersection between their interests, the skills they have and wish to acquire, and market demand,” the Gordon Career Center website reads.

The Careers by Design seminar is offered over winter break as part of the Winter on Wyllys program, and to increase accessibility across all of the University student body, its corresponding podcast, Careers by Design: The Interviews, is available on iTunes U and Soundcloud.