Reimagining the Employer Trust Score

As Handshake seeks to expand access to relevant opportunities for your students, balancing student trust, university guidance, and employer access is paramount. At Handshake Access 2021 we hosted a presentation called Reimagining the Employer Trust Score. In it, we discussed our plans to enhance the process for approving employers and jobs for your students by updating our Trust Score and flagging system.

You can watch the full presentation here, or read on for a summary.

Background

Just about every institution in the Handshake network will tell you that reviewing employers and jobs takes a lot of time. Institutions new to Handshake typically see a 2-3x increase in reputable job postings versus their old system. As a result, they spend an average of 240 hours per year vetting incoming employers and jobs for legitimacy and fit for their students.

At the same time, new employers on Handshake often struggle to get a foothold. The existing Trust Score amalgamates various factors to help schools vet employers; however, those factors become opaque when reduced to a 0-100 score. 55% of employer requests are ultimately declined. This disproportionately disadvantages smaller employers, who don’t always have the time or resources to understand the Trust Score.

The result? On average, students see about 3% of available job postings on Handshake.

We’ve spent the last year discussing these challenges with institutions and employers. We worked closely with our Trust & Safety Advisory Board, representing over 20 different institutions, to ensure that the solution would benefit our university partners. As a result, we identified opportunities to make employer and job approvals more nuanced, transparent, and safe.

“We really appreciate the attention that Handshake provides…you all are ridiculously attentive to your clients, and truly take the feedback we share with you seriously.”

- Craig Marinello, Manager of Student Employment and Internship Development | Southeastern Louisiana University | Trust & Safety Advisory Board Member

Rather than depending on the Trust Score to stand in for the myriad reasons an employer might not be a fit for your students, our solution separates employer fraud, employer profile validity, and institution fit into distinct buckets. This will help schools make more informed decisions around approvals.

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Flags that focus on fraud and abuse

Employer flags were developed as a way to identify bad actors and remove them from the Handshake network. However, over time, we’ve seen a plurality of flags fall into the “other” category. This reduces the efficacy of the flagging mechanism, as it obscures genuine flags.

To resolve this challenge, we will:

• Revamp flag taxonomy to focus only on fraud and abuse
• Allow institutions and students to flag both employers and employer users
• Notify institutions when a previously approved employer receives a legitimate flag for fraud or abuse

Check out our updated flag reasons below:

More nuanced reasons to decline employers and jobs

Currently, when you decline an employer on the index page, you’re given the option to provide a reason. Doing so can help employers better understand your decision and provide a signal to Handshake (and your peers) about the fit of the employer for your students.

That said, today, decline reasons aren’t required everywhere in Handshake (only on the index page), and can’t be used to help other institutions make approval decisions. They also play double or triple duty, acting both as flags and to call out missing profile information that should be required (more on the latter in the next section). Furthermore, decline reasons don’t exist for jobs—just employers. Including job decline reasons could provide additional signals—for instance, what if the employer is legitimate, but the job isn’t the right fit for your students?

To resolve these challenges, we’re updating employer decline reasons, adding job decline reasons that focus specifically on “fit” for an institution and prompting for decline reasons throughout the product.

In the future, we’ll be able to map decline reasons to employers on the backend of Handshake. Then, we will be able to provide nuanced filters to help you quickly decline employers or jobs based on information from your peers. For example, if your institution does not approve third party employers, in the future you will be able to easily identify and decline them.

Reimagining the Trust Score

As it stands today, the Trust Score focuses on four main inputs:

• Sufficient employer profile information
• Age of employer on the Handshake network
• Number of institution approvals and declines
• Existing flags

Every new employer has a Trust Score of N/A until they get their first job posting approved. There is also no distinction between different reasons an employer is declined. A decline is a decline, as far as the Trust Score is concerned, even if the employer is legitimate and the issue is simply school fit. Finally, the age requirement of the Trust Score unfairly disadvantages new employers.

With flags focused on suspected fraud and decline reasons focused on fit, Handshake’s initial assessment can focus specifically on validating employer profile information.

This new process of employer validation will determine whether the employer’s profile information proves their legitimacy. In its new form, the process of validation can be completely handled by Handshake. This change eliminates the need for the old Trust Score, which we’ll phase out in 2022. Plus, institutions will not have to take the time to manually review new employers’ profile information. Any employer on the Handshake network will have first been validated.

Employer validation will have two tracks—either way, an employer must be validated before they can do anything on Handshake.

• Automatic Validation: Provide enough profile information to be validated near-instantaneously.
• Manual Validation: Provide available profile information and work with Handshake’s Trust & Safety Team to be validated manually in a day or two.

You can see these two tracks laid out below:

A few more enhancements to note:

• We plan to require more employer profile fields during account creation—notably, user phone number, public phone number, and public email
• Employers will be able to share an institutional affiliation—a university contact who can vouch for them if manual validation is required
• This can help you ensure that small, local employers you work with closely are able to get started on Handshake

The Trust & Safety Advisory Board was very enthusiastic about the potential impact of these changes:

“Thanks for the time savings that this represents for our team. We’re very grateful.”

- Kim Heitzenrater, Director | Sewanee: The University of the South | Trust & Safety Advisory Board Member

“What really excites me about this process is that we could potentially auto approve all employers and spend our time approving jobs that are most relevant to our students.”

- Geni Harclerode, Director, Employer Recruitment and Engagement | Northwestern University | Trust & Safety Advisory Board Member

Summary & Timeline

Taken together, updating employer flags, creating new reasons to decline employers and jobs, and the new employer validation process will provide layers of verification that maintain a strong, safe, relevant network.

We plan to roll these updates out slowly, in close coordination with our institution partners. Check out a rough timeline below:

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