Like many seniors in the fine Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, I’ve recently had to come to terms with being completely unemployable. However, that’s not what you’d think if you took a look at my Handshake inbox.
As an explanation for those either way more or way less employed than me, Handshake is one of many job board-style websites meant to connect employers and employees, and it is the one that Carnegie Mellon’s Career and Professional Development Center has decided to push onto students. In fact, Handshake seems to have carved itself a niche as “the one for Universities,” with a handy little school dropdown when logging in and by integrating the schools’ own login methods.
Is Handshake good? Not according to Google Reviews, where 60 brave reviewers have collaborated to give it 2 stars. And this is not Michelin style — a 2-star rating is really bad. For comparison, this is almost an entire star worse than the notorious, vaguely criminal store on Forbes and Oakland whose entire review section is people complaining about getting scammed.
Here’s an assortment of reviews for Handshake:
Heath Cash gives one star and writes “I am an employer and strongly recommend anyone considering this company to find another method.”
Wade Zirkle gives one star and writes “Terrible. Expensive service that gives you candidates that are completely misaligned with the job description.”
Lisa Smith gives one star and writes “CU Boulder switched from a tried-and-true ob board to Handshake and it is unusable. Employers have to jump through hoops to post even simple jobs, and once jobs are posted, it is impossible to get them approved.”
Amanda Gordon gives one star and writes “This platform is a joke. My University uses this platform and even pushes it on us as students to “utilize” in order to apply and GET internships and jobs. BUT, you NEVER get ANY KIND of responses. BUT, EVERYDAY I have MULTIPLE messages from “recruiters” wanting me to attend webinars and so on. It’s LITERALLY a platform that is used to get numbers for attending company webinars so those companies can get their people quotas for their webinars, and those recruiters can get paid (if they are paid by the number of people in attendance) this platform is a WASTE OF TIME.”
Angelica Barrios gives five stars and brags: “Have applied and got many interview offers on jobs posted here! Have worked as a researcher at 2 prestigious institutions and both were from emails I received from Handshake, applied to, and interviewed for!”
These are obviously not great reviews, and they seem to show a dislike for the service from both consumer groups that Handshake is targeting — people seeking jobs and jobs seeking people. For a more local point of view, I conducted a poll to get Carnegie Mellon students’ thoughts, and found that only around 30 percent “like Handshake.” That is a fairly low figure, but it’s possible that all the students that Handshake helped were able to leverage their job offers and graduate early, exiting my sample. All I can know are my personal grievances with the service, as I’m just one man and would never claim to be representative of the student body.
What do I, the young buck that has hypothetically learned enough from four years of college to be a wonderful employee, get out of Handshake? Spam emails, and, more specifically, the same two types of spam emails.
The first type all follow this exact form: “Hi Zachary! I noticed your profile, and it looks like your qualifications and experience are a good match for our JOB role here at COMPANY NAME. We’re inviting a select few candidates to apply. Check out the role and let me know if you have any questions.”
These emails all follow this exact format, and make me very sad. Every time I receive one, I imagine an intellectual, sophisticated human birthed from their mother’s womb (or c-sectioned) sending this email out to me instead of making a contribution to the grand tapestry of human experience. Luckily, these are all likely being mass-sent by bots, so only myself and hundreds of other “select few candidates” will have our time wasted. Despite these emails all clamoring for me to bombard them with questions, my attempts to do some investigative journalism by asking “How many people have you sent this message to?” have yielded no response. I even tried to gain some insights that could be leveraged to either provide shareholder value or help a startup grind and build and level up for their next seed round of funding with some egg-head billionaire, but no dice.
The second type is more varied in structure, but examples all center around calling me a very smart cookie who should totally teach at a charter school, and advertising that I get “Paid Summers Off!” (duh). Now, I’m not some bleeding heart who’ll only work for a company that’s never killed anyone — I’d even work at Google if they let me hang out in the ball pits after work — but I’ll never work at a charter school. I don’t hate teachers, and I don’t hate the idea of being a teacher, I just don’t believe in a government-funded exodus from public schools. This is not my space to evangelize against charter schools, but plenty of research has been done on their issues, and I believe that even students who don’t win some ridiculous lottery deserve better.
Every once in a while I get a more compelling offer, like the opportunity to apply to be an Agricultural Inspector II for the County of Los Angeles Department of Agricultural Weights & Measures, or the privilege to be considered for the role of Decision Analyst for Discover Financial Services in Shanghai for an eye-popping salary of 20 thousand dollars per year (full-time). On the whole, though, it sometimes feels like I’m experiencing the culmination of millions of dollars of funding being put into wasting people’s time.
Despite all this, I still have email notifications turned on, not only because my email is already more filled with spam than a lumpia musubi, but because “you never know.” Maybe a real person will come screaming through the void and beckon me to apply for a real job. Probably not, though.
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