Location: Remote (U.S. Only - AZ, DC, CA, CO, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, NC, NM, NV, NJ, NY, OR, PA, SD, TN, TX, VA, WA, WI)

Hours: Monday through Friday, 8am - 5pm in your time zone (unless otherwise noted in hiring process). Preference for Eastern Time hours

Your impact:

Handshake is looking to bring on a Support Specialist, Contractor to provide support to our employer, student, and career services users. This role is a 6 month contract with the possibility of contract extension or conversion to our permanent Support Specialist role upon evaluation of fit for the role and company needs. If you are resourceful and attuned to detail, love digging into a complex and technical product, building strong relationships with customers and team members, and solving a wide variety of questions, bugs, and workflow needs - this is the role for you!

You will work closely with our Support Team to provide efficient and effective support and contribute to an overall seamless experience for users. You will help unblock our users, share trends and learnings with the Support Team, and continue to improve the customer experience and our team operations. As an advocate for our career centers, students, and employer users, you’ll improve the Handshake user experience and make an impact on our mission to democratize opportunity.

Your role:

• Contribute 40 hours per week during our business hours, Monday through Friday. Provide amazing email and phone support to Handshake customers via internal ticketing systems. Your day-to-day will consist of:
• 90%: resolving questions, bugs, feedback, and general inquiries. See daily averages below:
• Ticket Volume: ~20 - 30 email tickets per day
• Phone Volume: ~10 calls over a 4 hour daily phone shift
• 5%: attending team meetings (1-3 per week)
• 5%: completing administrative tasks (emails, checking daily announcements, training, etc.)
• Note: email and phone tickets will involve highly technical troubleshooting and workflows, building and troubleshooting custom reports, and making sure to provide tailored, personal responses while building relationships
• Use app demo environments, troubleshooting tools, help center, team communication channels, and internal documentation systems to find the quality answer for a wide range of users
• Maintain a standard level of excellence in regards to response times, resolution times, equal share of queue, and the quality of the customer support experience
• Be both a support specialist and an experienced consultant for users of the Handshake platform

Utilize internal tools to manage issues between Customer Support, Customer Success, Product, and Engineering

Your experience:

• Location: if working from home, you must be located in AZ, DC, CA, CO, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, NC, NM, NV, NJ, NY, OR, PA, SD, TN, TX, VA, WA, or WI.
• Technical Aptitude: Ability to learn technical tools and concepts quickly
• Resilience: Comfort with change and ambiguity.We’re a growing startup and always refining processes, tools, etc!
• Teamwork: Connects with teammates and actively builds a sense of community on Support and with other teams. Collaborates with manager and team on daily or weekly guidance on ticket workflows and prioritization.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills with a clear ability to communicate complex topics with simple language.
• Results oriented and ownership: Ability to maintain or exceed ticket and quality goals. High level of self accountability and integrity for processes and metrics.
• Passion for the problem: Desire to help give people the chance to build the career they want, no matter where they're from or what school they attend
• EQ: A strong sense of empathy with users of our products and cross functional partners
• Critical Thinking: High attention to detail and ability to troubleshoot with limited information and a clear plan of action.
• Expertise and Curiosity: Retains knowledge, shows ability to partially solve issues independently, and asks questions to increase personal knowledge. Isn’t afraid to do independent research on third party tools and systems to find answers.
• Growth Mindset: Positive, eager to learn, utilizes resources, takes and gives feedback, connects with support team and key cross team stakeholders.
• Diversity and Inclusion: Eagerness to contribute to and help build a diverse and inclusive team and exhibit these values internally and externally with customers or users.
• Coverage: Can provide a regular schedule to provide consistent assistance to users. Based in the U.S. and is not a current student.

Bonus areas of expertise:

• ZenDesk experience
• Programming, IT, data analysis or computer science courses, major or certifications
• EdTech or Higher Edu, customer service, leadership background, majors, courses, certifications
• Previous experience working in an Enterprise SaaS Customer Support team at a fast-paced startup or hypergrowth tech company, or customer focused position involving technical knowledge of a company's products and services
• Relevant experience in cross - functional communication or close partnerships with various teams (Success, Sales, Product etc)

About us

Handshake is the career platform for Gen Z. With a community of over 17 million students, alumni, employers, and career educators, Handshake’s network is where career advice and discovery turn into first, second, and third jobs. Nearly 1 million companies use Handshake to build their future workforce—from Fortune 500 to federal agencies, school districts to startups, healthcare systems to small businesses. Handshake is built for where you’re going, not where you’ve been.

When it comes to our workforce strategy, we’ve thought deeply about how work-life should look at Handshake. With our hybrid-work model, employees benefit from collaboration and shared team experiences three days per week in our vibrant offices, and enjoy the flexibility of remote work two days per week (unless noted in the specific job posting). Handshake is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, London, and Berlin.

Handshake is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or reasonable accommodation, please let your recruiter know during initial communications.

Hiring process:

Here’s an overview of our hiring process. You can read more about it below:

• Take home test: You’ll be asked a series of interactive questions that may require answers in several formats and you should expect to spend up to 1.5 hours creating your responses. Be sure to be as detailed as possible and answer all parts of the prompt. This enables us to learn more about you and see how you approach certain scenarios. It’s also a great way for you to see what it’ll be like working with us as the questions are related to day-to-day tasks you’ll be doing on the job.
• Virtual onsite interview: You’ll be meeting with 2 team members, including the hiring manager, for a 45-minute interview. The first part of the interview will consist of a live exercise where we will assess your troubleshooting skills as you share your computer screen and navigate a prompt. During the second half, we’ll ask you a series of questions, and this is a great time to ask any questions you may have.
• Decision: We’ll let you know if we are going to extend an offer or move forward with other candidates.