Handshake API
No general public REST API. A read-only, institution-scoped EDU API exists in beta for Career Services partners, granted through a Relationship Manager. Employers get an XML job feed capped at 5,000 jobs; there is no OAuth, sandbox, webhook, or SDK surface anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
Handshake scores D on the API Report Card. No general public REST API. A read-only, institution-scoped EDU API exists in beta for Career Services partners, granted through a Relationship Manager. Employers get an XML job feed capped at 5,000 jobs; there is no OAuth, sandbox, webhook, or SDK surface anywhere.
Without a usable official API, teams fall back on manual exports, file drops, or one-off vendor integrations. The other option is an unofficial API layer like Supergood that automates the authenticated web app directly.
Handshake is the dominant U.S. early-career and college recruiting network, founded in 2014 at Michigan Technological University by Garrett Lord (CEO), Ben Christensen, and Scott Ringwelski as a unified national alternative to the patchwork of campus-by-campus career-services job boards (Symplicity CSM, NACElink, Purple Briefcase, and assorted homegrown systems).
Vertical: Enterprise / HR / ERP, specifically the early-career / campus-recruiting slice (Sanity vertical: Enterprise/HR/ERP; Airtable bucket: misc). Student account creation and verification via university SSO (Okta, Shibboleth, Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra). Job and internship search, filtering, and AI-mediated job matching for students.
Near-universal in U.S. four-year college campus recruiting, 1,600+ universities and 18M+ students/alumni gives Handshake an effective monopoly on the student side of the early-career funnel in the U.S., comparable to LinkedIn's grip on the experienced-hire side.
Students / Alumni: name, university, major(s), GPA, expected / actual graduation date, work authorization, demographic / EEO responses, resume(s), cover letters, profile completeness, engagement signals.
Founded 2014 in Houghton, Michigan; headquartered in San Francisco; ~11-12 years old as of 2026.
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.