From the start, we’ve made it our mission to break down barriers and create equitable access to great jobs. With our most recent round of funding, we’re expanding our mission to build a platform students love, that helps early talent of all backgrounds receive access to opportunities – no matter who they know or where they go to school. Learn more about Handshake’s $80M Series E funding round.

Handshake is the largest early career network, helping millions of students from all backgrounds get hired and launch their careers with no connections, experience, or luck required. The Handshake community includes 18 million students and young alumni (9 million active students & alumni) from 1,400 educational institutions including four-year colleges, community colleges, boot camps, and 290+ minority-serving institutions. We connect up-and-coming talent across all 50 states with 600,000+ employers recruiting on Handshake - from every Fortune 500 company to thousands of small businesses, nonprofits, startups, and more. Handshake is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Denver, New York, and London.

Everyone is welcome at Handshake. We know diverse teams build better products and we are committed to creating an inclusive culture built on a foundation of respect for all individuals. We strongly encourage candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, historically marginalized or underrepresented groups to apply.

If you are not sure that you’re 100% qualified, but up for the challenge – we want you to apply. We believe skills are transferable and passion for our mission goes a long way.

Your Impact

Handshake is looking to bring on a Manager for the Support Education team to lead and grow a team of full-time Support Specialists that assist our Education partners. You’ll play a key role in building scalable solutions and processes while nurturing a fun, collaborative, inclusive culture. You’ll report to and work closely with the Head of Support, EDU and cross-functionally collaborate with Support Leadership, Product, Engineering, and Finance/BizOps teams to improve operations, efficiency and quality; reduce support volume and first response times; and contribute to an overall seamless user experience. A primary focus of your role will include refining the skill of managing both up and down--supporting your team and your manager--while contributing to mindful decisions that account for impact to our users, team and the business. Additionally, you’ll collaborate on and execute EDU Support training and enablement programs for full-time Support staff as well as other company staff. Ultimately, you’ll play a pivotal role in building a diverse, hardworking team that loves contributing to our mission and pushes themselves to go above and beyond to provide exceptional external partner experiences--advocating for and enabling user success with our platform--while acting as an effective internal partner to fellow Global Support teams and the company as a whole. 

Your Role

• Assist in hiring, training, motivating, coaching, and empowering a hardworking, diverse team of EDU Support Specialists

• Contribute to managing Support training, onboarding, and enablement programs

• Drive improvements in efficiency, quality, response times and customer satisfaction within your team and across the entire customer support organization

• Influence the direction of Handshake by partnering with the Head of Support, EDU on managing and participating in cross-functional projects with Support Leadership, Product, Engineering, and Finance/BizOps

• Utilize internal tools to manage issues between Support, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Customer Success, & other internal teams

• Identify and lead efforts to scale EDU Support resources such as our Help Center, internal documentation, training, and community programs

What We’re Looking For

• At least 2+ year working in a management position, ideally with an Enterprise SaaS Customer Support team at a fast-paced tech company

• Recruiting and Hiring: Ability to develop job descriptions, application and interview protocols, rubrics, align team on vetting, sourcing candidates and creating a world-class, inclusive candidate experience. 

• Onboarding and Training: Ability to identify onboarding, training, and enablement needs, create materials, assess learning, and iterate accordingly

• Leadership Experience and Presence: Actively coach and develop relationships and tools to drive a diverse, high performing, engaged team. Confident, mature, and displays authority within a team, across teams, and with vendors or business partners

• Exceptionally Results Oriented: Analytical, methodical approach to identifying challenges and measuring impact and strong ownership in tracking metrics and outcomes

• Ability to Think Systematically: Identify and build infrastructure, processes, and tools to drive efficiency and streamlined operations

• Entrepreneurial and Consultative: You’re a Do-er, have a strong work ethic, and a bias for action. You’ll do whatever it takes to meet customer needs.

• Passion for the Problem: Helping launch careers and grow companies by making the best matches between companies and new graduates

• Empathy and Humility: Exceptional EQ with a strong sense of empathy and self-awareness that shines through actions and communication with directs, peers, leadership, customers, and partners. Eager to give and receive feedback and consistently demonstrate a growth mindset

• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills with a clear ability to communicate complex topics with simple language to a diverse audience

• High Attention to Detail: Ability to troubleshoot with limited information to determine a clear plan of action

• Experience with Support/Tech Tools: Previous experience using Zendesk, Jira or other SaaS support tools--preferably well-versed. Technical background is a plus!

• Travel: Willingness to potentially travel to SF and/or Denver to collaborate with Support, Finance/BizOps, Employer Premium Partnerships, Success, Product, and Engineering teams

• Bonus: Knowledge of how online recruiting technology works, and the ability to explain it in ordinary terms

Role Expectations and outcomes

• Team performance: Actively coaches and develops specialists to meet performance goals via consistent 1:1s, including:

  • 100% SLAs (24 hr response time on 1st touch)

  • 95% Team CSAT

  • 80%+ QA score on accurate responses, handling and communication

  • 20 weighted solves per day (20 EDU tickets with ability to flex into other queues as needed) or strive to clear the EDU queue each business day

• Oversees new team member onboarding and continued training 

• Assists specialists in developing short- and long-term career goals, identifying and enabling opportunities to support this growth 

• Able to navigate difficult conversations with grace, fluidly adjusting to your audience’s communication styles, needs, backgrounds, morale, motivation levels, etc.

• Queue Monitoring: Continually keeps a pulse on the EDU queue to ensure SLAs are met, rallying the team when necessary

• Hosts regular team meetings to promote group learning/sharing, community and fun!

• Consistently participates and offers a thoughtful point of view in all team meetings and communication channels, asking questions and providing input to help empower the team and our customers

• Takes initiative to learn updates, changes, or context and creates training materials and conducts training for team

• Proactively develops and updates SOPs, trains team, and moderates for consistency

• Completes projects, deliverables, and tasks on time and proactively communicates any changes to both your manager and stakeholders.

• Self-driven to identify areas for strategic and operational improvement, works with direct manager to develop projects and executes them effectively.

• Exhibits an exemplary executive presence, appropriately managing emotions and maintaining composure in team meetings, events, and any other work settings

• Proactively communicates progress, plans, problems, and changes. Closes loops on Slack or email threads.

• Be available and responsive during business hours (8 hours/day) for internal and external phone calls, meetings, and daily team or company communication (including Slack, Zoom Video Calls, Email, Phone) in designated time zone