St. Joe’s officially switched to Handshake as the new online career resource platform, replacing SJU Careers, on May 14.

Handshake, used by over 500 colleges across the country, is a resource for students with the capability to connect them with employers for opportunities such as on-campus jobs, volunteer work, internships and full-time opportunities.

Scott Rappaport, associate director of the Career Development Center, said that the response to Handshake has been promising and the user-friendly platform makes it easy for students to connect.

“Every student automatically has an account,” Rappaport said.“We encourage students to go on and use it and fill out their profile and connect in the various ways that Handshake brings students and employers together. Handshake will try to get to know you just like Facebook or LinkedIn and will make recommendations based on things you’ve preferenced in the past.”

The biggest benefit of Handshake is that students will be able to connect more easily with the Career Development Center.

“It will provide more opportunities than our old system,” Rappaport said. “It’s also more of a one-stop-shop. It handles all of our appointments and also events. Anything that we have coming up, students will be able to see under the events tab and that includes events that employers are holding.”

Since the launch of Handshake, 1,200 students have completed their profile, 4,202 employers have connected to St. Joe’s and 7,250 jobs have been posted, according to Rappaport.

Among St. Joe’s students who have completed their profile, Isabella Pavlou ’19 made the switch from SJU Careers to Handshake about a month ago after receiving emails from St. Joe’s promoting the new platform. Pavlou said she’s happy she made the switch to Handshake.

“I like how it is easy access to see jobs that are available and future interviews on campus,” Pavlou said. “I definitely will be applying for jobs using Handshake.”

Arianna Flynn ’19 said the process of getting started on Handshake is very intuitive.

“It’s single sign on, so you just use your SJU login to sign in,” Flynn said. “They ask the basic questions, like name, major, school, work experience, resume, GPA and extracurriculars. I can tell in the future this will be extremely useful in my job search.”

Rappaport said the goal of the Career Development Center is to connect students with their careers and teach them how to network. He is confident that Handshake will help them in doing so.