VCU news

By Dina Weinstein

The career platform Handshake has again selected Virginia Commonwealth University as a winner in its Career Spark Awards program, which recognizes the leading career centers on college campuses nationwide.

Handshake connects students and alumni to employers and opportunities, along with career advisors and related events and workshops. Of more than 1,500 higher education institutions that use Handshake, VCU is among only 39 to be honored in the second year of the awards program.

Founded in 2014, Handshake aims to ensure that all college students have equal access to meaningful careers, and its network now includes more than 17 million student and young alumni users as well as roughly 1 million companies. Its Career Spark Awards focus on three categories based on Handshake data — student engagement, employer engagement and reporting/analytics/First Destination Survey — and VCU was recognized for reporting/analytics achievement that includes its FDS on post-graduate outcomes.

After being among the inaugural honorees last year, VCU achieved “a well-earned honor” with its repeat win this year, according to the Handshake relationship manager who works with VCU. “Their aptitude for using Handshake’s powerful reporting tools is unmatched, as they activate data insights to tell intricate stories and develop action plans to empower their work.”

Danielle Pearles, senior associate director for employer and experiential development at VCU Career Services, has served as primary administrator for Handshake since it was implemented at VCU in 2018. She said Handshake’s analytics help support both student and employer outreach and programming, including over a dozen career fairs hosted on campus and a combination of over 700 in-person and virtual workshops/recruiting sessions annually.

“Our students are engaging with Handshake at a high level,” Pearles said. “They really appreciate that they’re able to access it and have one central resource to go to on campus for any type of opportunity posting that they are looking for, so that they can gain experience, earn money while they’re in school and be well-positioned to obtain a full-time job post-graduation, which then ties into the data collected through the First Destination Survey.”

Since VCU started using Handshake to collect post-graduation data in 2019, the overall data rate has risen from about 30% to 77% as of the May 2024 graduating cohort.

At VCU, Handshake is used and supported by the central VCU Career Services team as well as staff in the School of Business Career Services and College of Engineering Career Services. The three units collaborate to make Handshake a destination for students, faculty, staff, alumni and employers.

And it is a robust career resource: On the VCU platform in 2023-24, employers posted 129,500 opportunities – including more than 86,000 full-time jobs, 8,000 part-time jobs and 31,000 internships, as well as other experiences.

“We look for the gaps of who’s coming in for our services and how can we reach out to them in a thoughtful way,” said Haley Sims, VCU Career Services senior associate director for career advising and discovery. “We use Handshake to send email campaigns to students. We’ve run a few campaigns this fall to reach students who indicate on their intake survey that they want support with career and [academic] major decision-making.”

Leveraging Handshake to reach students and encourage them to engage with Career Services is “an important way that we can use data to focus on folks who might not otherwise know about us and reach them as well,” Sims said.

“It’s nice that Handshake has seen that we are using the tool in the way that they intended,” she added. “And apparently more so than our peers. We’re in the top 2% of usage for reports, analytics, and FDS which is pretty exciting. It makes sense – because we use it so often.”