Humanizing Students' Career Profiles on Handshake
In collaboration with Handshake, a leading career platform for students and recent graduates connecting 20M+ students and alumni with 1M+ employers, I led a research-driven redesign of the student profile experience to increase engagement and profile quality. Research with 100+ students revealed a core tension: students wanted to showcase their thinking, growth, and soft skills, but existing profiles only captured polished outcomes.
This work resulted in Phase-Based Projects, a guided storytelling system that helps students break projects into meaningful phases and showcase how they think, grow, and solve problems. Contextual prompts reduce the “what do I write?” barrier, making profiles easier to complete and more representative of the skills behind the final outcome.
Role
Product Design Project Manager, Contract
Team
Piper Yu, Ashley Canizalez, Grace Zhang, Madison Lee
Timeline
Feburary 2025 - June 2025
Tools
Figma, Claude
THE PROBLEM
Students aren’t completing their profiles
Handshake asked our team to find out why a large number of students were not completing their profiles. This is a critical issue because completing a profile is the foundational first step on the platform.
So what?
For Students
Incomplete profiles make it hard to stand out to recruiters and leave students less incentivized to apply for jobs.
For Handshake
Incomplete profiles make it harder for recruiters to accurately evaluate candidates, while also limiting Handshake’s ability to deliver meaningful matches between students and employers.
RESEARCH
Understanding how students want to showcase their work, and where tools fall short
Handshake asked our team to find out why a large number of students were not completing their profiles. This is a critical issue because completing a profile is the foundational first step on the platform.
30+ in-depth interviews and contextual inquiries
I led our team in conducting 30+ in-depth interviews and contextual inquiries with students across 20+ majors and 20+ universities. We explored how students present themselves, showcase their work, and engage with their profiles over time.
Structure: We first explored students’ backgrounds and career goals, then examined how they build, revise, and share their profiles and projects. We also had students walk through their profiles to understand what helps them stand out and what they want to highlight more.
Goals: We aimed to understand how students tell their professional stories, where current profiles fall short, and what would motivate deeper engagement.
Survey of 78 college students
We designed a survey that included demographics, profile usage, Likert-scale questions on identity and confidence, and a major-specific deep dive to understand how students present their work and the challenges they encounter.
Where students feel confident
Peer comparison would motivate them to update their profile
74%
AI could highlight strengths they missed themselves
67%
Want to show who they collaborated with
57%
Where students feel unsupported
Know what recruiters want to see
30%
Feel supported or guided while building their profile
24%
Can tell the full story behind their projects
19%
Looking at how other platforms enable students to showcase their work
We conducted a competitive analysis across career platforms and beyond to understand how students from different majors actually showcase projects, share their work, and build professional connections.
Looking at platforms like Medium revealed how rich media, storytelling, social engagement, templates, and AI suggestions can help students communicate both their process and outcomes. Compared to these experiences, Handshake profiles felt static and impersonal, highlighting an opportunity to make student profiles more dynamic and story-driven.
Tech/AI work: Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub
Design-focused: Adobe Portfolio, Dribbble, Behance
Portfolio tools: Notion, Framer, Webflow
Thought leadership: X, LinkedIn, Medium
SYNTHESIS
Using affinity mapping and personas to synthesize insights and align stakeholders
Primary synthesis methods
6 user personas
To empathize with our users, we developed 6 distinct user personas based on our research findings. Each persona represented a key user archetype with unique goals and frustrations.
Affinity mapping
I led our team in synthesizing 280+ qualitative interview insights into 26 core themes through affinity mapping.
Aligning with stakeholders
I planned and facilitated a 5-hour in-person Jam Session with six Handshake PMs, engineers, and designers. Through collaborative activities like journey mapping and theme ranking, stakeholders engaged directly with our research and collectively reviewed the 26 themes from affinity mapping.
Together, we narrowed these themes to six priority areas for deeper exploration. The session validated our findings and aligned the team around the most critical student pain points.
DEFINING MY SCOPE
We stopped asking “How can we make profiles more customizable?” and asked “How can we help students tell better stories?”
The research showed that students didn’t simply need more places to add content. They needed structure that could help them translate their experiences into something meaningful, personal, and recruiter-friendly.
Core problems
👀 Profiles felt passive and invisible
Without feedback or clear recruiter visibility, students had little reason to keep updating or personalizing their profiles.
“I don’t know if employers can actually see me or understand what I’m capable of based on my profile.”
🔄 Process mattered as much as the outcome
Students wanted to communicate the thinking, iteration, and growth behind their projects, but current profiles primarily surfaced polished results.
Only 18.3% of students felt they could effectively tell the full story behind their projects.
😰 Lack of guidance increased uncertainty
Students often struggled with the blank page: What should I include? What do recruiters want to see? Is my experience good enough?
Only 25.5% of students felt supported or guided while building their profile.
🧱 Rigid layouts flattened diverse paths
Standardized, text-heavy formats made it difficult for early-stage, creative, and interdisciplinary students to represent themselves authentically.
“My academic and career experiences are all over the place, which makes it difficult to craft a clear narrative.”
How might we...
help students dynamically showcase the unique process behind their projects, rather than reducing their work to bullet points?
IDEATION
We explored broadly, then converged with intention
We used rapid ideation, including Crazy 8s, to explore concepts around storytelling, customization, and process visibility. We then evaluated ideas using an impact to effort matrix to identify concepts that could deliver meaningful value without disrupting Handshake’s existing profile structure.
Top voted, most impactful ideas:
Dual Section Profiles: Allows students to separate identity from accomplishments for clarity
Aashna Patel
Work vs. Play Sections: Highlights both professional skills and personal passions to show holistic identity
Aashna Patel
Toggleable “Concise vs. Expanded” Project Views: Toggle between quick view & full case study to balance recruiter scans & student storytelling.
Aashna Patel
Movable Sections: Gives flexibility to prioritize what matters most in their story
Aashna Patel
Journey Map Generator: Narrative tiles showing student growth over time, great for evolving, non-linear journeys; best as a future add-on to milestones.
Aashna Patel
OUR CHOSEN IDEA
ITERATION
How our milestone concept evolved through stakeholder and user feedback
Early exploration of milestones
We kicked off milestones and decided to make them pop with media templates.
How it works: We added media templates that students can insert either as standalone sections or within individual milestones. These templates support formats like slideshows, videos, code snippets, timelines, and embeds, allowing students to match each project step with the medium that best fits their field.
Research Justifications: Inspired by platforms like Wix and informed by survey insights on media preferences across majors, media templates reduce formatting anxiety while balancing structure and flexibility. This approach helps students focus on communicating their process and impact, enabling clearer expression across diverse academic backgrounds.
Add your work experience or project
Upload media templates (with or without milestones). Templates can be added per milestone and used together or separately.
Add your media templates
Select a media template, based on how students in different fields prefer to showcase their work.
CLIENT & USER FEEDBACK
Less Choices, More Direction: User research and client feedback showed that the main challenge wasn’t a lack of options, but not knowing where to start. Adding more choices early on only increased overwhelm, so we narrowed the experience around one core problem: providing clear structure and guidance.
Making Progress Feel More Manageable: We renamed “Milestones” to “Phases” to make progress feel more iterative and lower-stakes. This helped address the “What do I write?” barrier by giving students a clearer starting point without making the process feel overwhelming.
What we presented to Handshake: Phase-Based Project Storytelling
Why this idea?: Students repeatedly voiced the need to show how they worked, not just what they made. This idea directly supports that need by allowing users to add checkpoints or "milestones" that reflect key moments in a project's journey, without adding unnecessary complexity. We also decided to rename “Milestones” to “Phases" based on user feedback to make progress feel lower-stakes and more iterative. This directly addresses the “what do I write?” barrier and help students start with clarity
Add Phases
Select a phase type (Problem, Insight, Outcome, Reflection, Other), add a description, optional date, and tag relevant skills. Prompts help guide what to write.
View in Projects Section
Phases appear in the project timeline, showing type, description, date, and skills for a clear, structured view of the project.
MY POST-PROJECT REVISIONS
Refining the prototype with recruiter and student feedback
After presenting to Handshake, I continued iterating on the project to incorporate the recruiter perspective and validate the experience with users. I tested an updated prototype with one recruiter and three students, using their feedback to strengthen clarity, scalability, and real-world usefulness.
My final prototype:
Real-time progress and flexible iteration
A split interface lets students see phases update live as they add, edit, or rearrange them. This reinforces momentum, makes progress visible, and supports projects that are still evolving rather than “finished.”
Support for in-progress work
By making duration optional and allowing continuous updates, the design removes pressure for a polished final product and supports ongoing growth, reflecting insights from research.
More supportive, motivating UX writing
I refined phase prompts to be reassuring and action-oriented, encouraging imperfect, in-progress writing and addressing students’ fear that their work isn’t “good enough.”
Clear instructions
Because students were confused by “phases,” I added lightweight onboarding and an explainer to clarify how they work, why they’re different, and how to get started confidently.
Before
Students can only include a title, role, and date for their projects.
Process and soft skills were hidden
Blank page paralysis with no guidance
The how and why behind work were invisible
After
Phase-Based Storytelling
Clear prompts remove guesswork
Process, thinking, and growth are visible
Supports in-progress work, not just polished results
Recruiters can quickly scan problem-solving and reflection
IMPACT
Clients recognized our final deliverable as a thoughtful, user-centered solution with real roadmap impact
Impact Overview
✍️ Increasing Profile Completion & Quality
By providing guidance and reducing the "what do I write?" barrier, this feature is designed to increase the number of students who complete the project section of their profile.
🌟 Boosting Student Engagement & Pride
A profile that better reflects a student's true identity and process encourages them to update it more frequently and share it with their network, turning a static document into a source of pride.
🤝 Improving Recruiter-Student Matches
By highlighting soft skills like critical thinking and iteration (which 90% of recruiters value), this feature would allow recruiters to find better-aligned candidates beyond keyword matches, increasing the value of the platform for employers.
🌱 Personal Growth
This project solidified my ability to lead a research team through ambiguity, make strategic pivots based on stakeholder feedback, and maintain team morale during challenging phases.
Client Testimonials
"Impressed by the iteration, quality of the final deliverable and clear organized process to reach the final deliverable state. I think many of the ideas the team proposed... will make it into the Handshake profile roadmap in 2026+ so we truly value the thinking and insights."
"The team's willingness to iterate, learn and grow. It truly felt like having a set of interns working at Handshake for a semester. And they live and breath as our user segments-as GenZ in college-so to hear the painpoints from the source and then watch them improve it brought the experience full circle. You could tell the team put their heart and soul into the work they delivered and were excited and motivated to support eachother and apply feedback from the Handshake team."
Team Testimonials
“Aashna has been incredible throughout the project. She’s played a key role in helping us navigate our relationship with the client, offering thoughtful guidance and input during meetings, and consistently sending out clear action items to keep us on track. She’s highly organized and always one step ahead by frequently sending reminders, checking in on progress, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.”
“Aashna’s level of involvement is just right. The perfect balance of guidance and freedom. She is good at keeping the consultants accountable of our action items and giving guidance whenever asked/necessary. She continuously asks for our opinions and does an amazing job with communicating with our client.”
“Her guidance helped me better understand how to approach client interactions, structure deliverables, and contribute meaningfully to the team. It gave me a sense of direction and helped build my confidence in situations that were initially unfamiliar.”
REFLECTIONS
Learning how to lead a team, align stakeholders, and stay grounded in research
📊 Start with the users and stay with them
During prototyping, we got distracted adding nice-to-have features that didn’t address the main issue. Going back to our research helped us stay objective and aligned with what students truly needed.
🎯 Start simple
It’s tempting to solve everything at once, but our most effective work came from narrowing our scope and tackling one problem well. You can always build more later, but it’s better to do one thing really well than a bunch of things halfway.
🔄 Redos are not a failure
Sometimes redos felt like throwing away effort. But we learned that the process (however messy or repetitive) is just as valuable as the outcome. Things rarely click on the first try and every “redo” got us closer to something that actually worked.
🔥 Passion was everything
Everyone on the team was deeply invested in this project. We even chose to extend the project beyond the original end date because we wanted to see our ideas through. It didn’t feel like “extra work” because we genuinely loved working on this.
This write-up only shows part of the process.
Reach me at aashnapatel11@berkeley.edu and I will walk you through the rest.
