The career platform Handshake launched a creator program in the summer of 2024 to bring a personal side to networking.
The new program aims to help students foster a peer-to-peer support system by bringing students from a diverse range of schools together to share their academic and professional development stories.
“We just wanted to grab a couple of students to share their stories, and we started off with about 20 students … and it kind of snowballed from there,” said Karyme Perez, Handshake’s senior creator community manager.
The career platform is still in the works but has already made progress in helping students share their voices on Handshake. In 2025, the program expanded to 35 schools in the U.S. and picked schools based on getting a “good base” of students in all the country’s regions, Perez said.
With a continually growing selection of students and schools, Handshake aims to expand the program and ensure proper representation so that everyone can connect and grow.
“We wanted to be sure that we’re connecting with multiple students who have something to say, who have something unique about them, who have amazing points of view,” Perez said. “[Or] they’re just getting started, and they want to learn with an audience, or they’ve already done amazing things, and they want to share those things, and that’s how our creator program started, it’s really just trying to bring amazing student stories to light, and now we’re really focused on helping them build their brand.”
Unlike other career platforms like LinkedIn or Glassdoor, Handshake prioritizes early career development. The platform has partnered with career services in over 1,500 universities nationwide, including the University of Utah.
“When you look at other networking platforms or job platforms, a lot of their jobs are focused on mid to senior-level roles,” Perez said. “For us, we’re really focused on that primary part where we’re like, ‘okay, let’s get students their career experience to begin with and then help them through that revolving door’ or maybe they’re going into a master’s degree, how can we support them there?”
Handshake’s approach helps students gain access to internships and career resources and creates a space for them to network with employers who specifically seek early-career talent.
Heidi Hagberg, Handshake’s head of communications, said the company’s co-founder, Garrett Lord, realized the need for developing the platform after seeing the limited reach career recruiters have on college campuses.
“They could only choose a handful of schools to travel to across the country, and so he took it back and was like, ‘this is why we have to democratize access. These students are missing out on opportunities at some of the hottest companies,” Hagberg said. “They then built the employer relationships, and now it’s this three-sided marketplace.”
