social media & social networks

Handshake: Is This the End of Linkedin?

Handshake has quickly taken the world of job search platforms by storm. It has been becoming highly promoted to students through their universities in the US. This is resulting in Handshake becoming one of the top ways that students are finding jobs. With the workforce flipped upside down by Covid-19, companies are looking to fill many positions. Their target; eager students looking to start their career.

Does the rising popularity of Handshake appear to be the end of Linkedin?

Handshake: Is this the end of Linkedin?

linkedin
The next great job search platform, Handshake, is sparking the interest of many companies

What is Handshake?

Handshake Logo
Source – joinhandshake.com

Handshake is a fairly new platform founded in 2013 by Stryder Corp.

According to their site, Handshake has become the leading early career community in the US in only a few years.

This is an online recruiting platform for higher education students and alumni. The key attribute that sets it apart from other job searching sites is the connectivity. They work with connecting employers directly to students through their school or university. The job listings, as a result, are specifically directed towards students.

HANDKAW

Currently they are partnered with more than 1,400 colleges and universities and over 750,000 employers.

This job search platform allows students to look at jobs based off their skills as well as giving students personalized job suggestions based off their major.

Students are given the ability to quickly connect with specific companies they’re already interested in. Better yet, since these companies know they are listing positions for students, they understand that they don’t have a very long work history if any experience at all.

Through Handshake, students will no longer have to feel the excitement of finding a great job opportunity only to find that they’re unqualified due to a lack of work experience

Is Handshake the New LinkedIn?

Linkedin is an online business social networking service officially launched in 2003. Their mission is to ‘connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful’. The platform not only allows people to connect with other people on a professional level, but, like Handshake, allows for people to connect with businesses. With 822 million registered users and 57 million organizations, Linkedin typically ranks in the top 5 in most ‘job search platform’ ranking scales.

According to Forbes.com:

Given LinkedIn is about connecting with people you know or helping you build relationships from your professional experiences, in some sense that is, by definition, backward looking. Handshake, by contrast, focuses on the future and where you’re going

Unlike other social media platforms, Linkedin remains professional and helps people gain exposure to employers and recruiters. People can assert their brand and display their skillset to the public and can keep people connected without the drama and nonsense other platforms may bring.

As promising as this sounds for many professionals, there are still downsides.

Handshake

The Downsides

Linkedin is broader than Handshakes niche demographic. Anyone can sign up for a Linkedin account resulting in over 25% of US adults being Linkedin users. Though, job searching on both platforms is great, depending on who you ask, one might work out a lot better than the other.

Creating your account is a time consuming process and people might find it difficult to fill out all the profile details.

On Linkedin, it doesn’t take long for the fake and barren accounts to begin sending requests for a meaningless and inactive connection. 

Similarly, Handshake comes with many spam listings. Hundreds of companies push their job listings by messaging hundreds of students in hopes of a reply.

Speaking from personal experience, there are currently about 200 messages in my inbox from companies sending automated messages about their jobs

As a result, students find it difficult to distinguish if the company is truly interested in working with them. This results in tons of dead links to filled job listings, creating a feeling of general disconnect.

Handshake

Handshake Versus Linkedin

In conclusion, Handshake and Linkedin may have similar goals, they also have their own set of benefits and features. As a student, Handshake proves to be a great way to gain necessary experience when first joining the workforce. As a professional, Linkedin proves to to be a great way to maintain connections and promote your personal brand to a wide audience.

Handshake

In turn, both platforms are still on a steady rise. One can only benefit from having as many tools in their toolkit as possible.

As a result, they both are here to help people on their path to finding their dream job.

Jared Roth

Jared Roth

Jared is a senior Business Administration major with a focus on Supply Chain Management and Logistics at Arizona State University. Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin currently located in Paris, France with Visionary Marketing.
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