Support Specialist, Contract

ABOUT HANDSHAKE Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career, regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today, we power 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions. In 2025, we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data. We’ve grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month. WHY JOIN HANDSHAKE NOW: - Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel - Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions - Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders - Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue THE ROLE 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. At its core, this is a technical enterprise support role: you'll provide strategic email, phone, and video consultation and support for customers and users from small organizations to huge marquee brands like Google, Amazon and Cornell University so you'll need to demonstrate confidence in every setting with them. 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, Success, and Product Teams, and continue to improve the customer experience and our team operations. As an advocate for our career centers, students, alumni, employers, and Handshake AI fellows 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 - Flex across support queues with a positive mindset, including Trust and Safety and Handshake AI, as team needs shift. - 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 YOU HAVE: - Location: if working from home, you must be located in AZ, DC, CA, CO, CT, 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. Looks for ways to put AI to work for customers and the team. - 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 POINTS: - ZenDesk experience - Programming, IT, data analysis or computer science courses, major or certifications - Experience using AI tools or building lightweight automations to improve support workflows. - 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) 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. You are welcome to use AI tools as part of your process. Please indicate which tools you used and how in your response, and ensure the final response is ultimately in your own words, as this is a key part of our evaluation. 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.