Career Services partners with Handshake to revamp HireTigers

The University’s Office of Career Services has transitioned to a new version of the HireTigers online career management system.

The new site, which ispowered by a different vendor and offers high-tech and high-touch resources for undergraduate and graduate students,went live on Sept. 1.

After launching the initial version of HireTigers, which was powered by Symplicity, last fall, Career Services continued to evaluate other vendors and collect anonymous feedback from students as well as student groups such as the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club and the Undergraduate Student Government, Career Service's Director of External Relations and Operations Evangeline Kubu said.

Social platforms are increasingly used in recruiting, Kubu said, adding that Career Services ultimately chose the new vendor, Handshake, to create a site that would look and feel more like a social and professional networking platform.

Handshake is a career services management platform that uses software to help facilitate interactions between students, employers and career services.

Handshake CEO Garrett Lord declined to comment.

“One of the key differences is that it was developed from the ground up with social recruiting and mobile interface in mind,” Kubu said.

This update of HireTigers includes automatic calendar syncing, improved navigation and personalization capability.

Michelle Nedashkovskaya ’16, president of the Peer Career Advisors, has been trained on the new site. She said she thinks it has an improved interface that integrates everything a student might need from Career Services in one place. She described the HireTigers site launched last fall as similar to the beta version of HireTigers.

One problem with the old version, she said, was that it was complicated for students to select their academic and professional fields of interest from drop-down menus of options.

“This time it’ll just be clearer and easier to handle,” Nedashkovskaya said. “You are now supposed to bring in more information about yourself, and employers will be able to see your information on there so that will make everything much easier to filter through and make opportunities that are more relevant to your interests accessible to you.”

Yankia Ned ’17, who logged into the new site and explored the updates, said that although she didn’t use HireTigers much before, she might use it now.

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“It’s definitely more intuitive. It’s kind of like Facebook in a way, and I kind of like that,” Ned said. “They should definitely have a more specified way of seeing things though so you don’t get flooded with information.”

Viveka Mastandrea ’17, said she thinks learning how to better highlight her strengths to employers online would be helpful.

“It’s so different now that people can access that more easily,” Mastandrea said. “I am kind of more in favor of being able to separate personal accounts and professional accounts, but I’m still very much a fan of social sites like LinkedIn for getting yourself out there.”

Kubu explained that the update to HireTigers comes at the beginning of a concerted effort Career Services will be making in the coming months to educate and engage students online and across social platforms. She said she thinks most students use social media primarily for personal use, but more and more employers are looking at candidates’ profiles on different social media sites.

Career Services is going to try to connect with all of its stakeholders online on sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter this upcoming academic year, she added.

“We’re really going to be focusing on the nuances between professional and personal uses of social sites,” Kubu said. “We’re going to enhance our efforts to teach students how to design a professional digital presence.”

Career Services launched HireTigers in September 2014 as a replacement for the former TigerTracks system, in response to student feedback that the former platform was outdated and difficult to navigate.

Kubu also noted that Career Services is constantly reevaluating the technology it uses in order to provide cutting-edge resources to students.

“Students should stay tuned for additional resources that are going to be added soon,” Kubu said. “We’re actively looking at many other technologies.”