Handshake shows you who came to your school. We show you who's hiring.
Handshake is the default at most universities for a good reason: it carries the employers with a relationship to your campus, and some of those jobs genuinely exist nowhere else. It's also bounded by exactly that.
One feed is defined by your school's employer list. The other is defined by the employers' own career pages, which is a different and much larger set.
Side by side
Each row is how that tool is built to work, taken from what it says about itself. None of this is a benchmark we ran.
| Handshake | Trakker | |
|---|---|---|
| What defines the feed | Employers with a relationship to your university | About 1,700 companies watched directly, campus or no campus |
| When you're told | On the platform's own notification schedule | Within minutes of the job appearing |
| Campus events | Strong, and why a lot of students open it | A feed of fairs and info sessions next to the jobs |
| Jobs outside your school's network | Not covered | Covered, because coverage is per employer and not per campus |
| Resume and pipeline | Profile and document upload | Block-based editor, tailored versions, stage-tracked pipeline |
What Handshake is better at
Anything that runs through your university. On-campus interview scheduling, employers who only recruit at specific schools, career-center workflows. Those rest on institutional relationships rather than software and we can't replicate them. Keep the account.
When not to switch
If your school has deep employer relationships in your field and you're getting interviews through them, that channel is working. We help most when the jobs you want are at companies that don't recruit at your campus.
The detail
- The two feeds barely overlap
- This is the part worth understanding before you choose. A campus feed and a career-page sweep are drawn from different populations: one is employers who signed up with your university, the other is employers who published a job. Most people run both because neither contains the other.
Other comparisons
- Trakker vs LinkedIn job alertsAn alert built on an index can't be faster than the crawl that feeds it. Reading the employer's hiring system removes that step.
- Trakker vs GitHub internship listsA repo is something you have to remember to check. An alert is something that finds you.
- Trakker vs job boardsIndex, then notify. We drop the first step, and the second stops being a schedule.