Relationship Manager, Growth

Everyone is welcome at Handshake. We know diverse teams build better products and we are committed to creating an inclusive culture built on a foundation of respect for all individuals. We strongly encourage candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, historically marginalized or underrepresented groups to apply.

Your impact

As a Relationship Manager on our Education Success Team you are responsible for ensuring your education partners are healthy, happy, successful, and retained.

You will create repeatable and reusable tactics for driving engagement across our education partners' teams, which could include everything from webinars, email nurture, product hooks, etc. You will channel the voice of the customer both quantitatively and qualitatively to rally the necessary people and highlight success.

You will report to a Manager of Education Success, working closely with customer support, sales, product and marketing to deliver a world-class customer experience and drive our business through renewals and expansions.

Your role

Product Knowledge

1. Answering questions regarding the Handshake product daily
2. Identifying, diagnosing, and helping customers resolve data health issues
3. Expanding and deepening product adoption and usage amongst your career center partners
4. Gathering, documenting, and sharing best practices on how education partners can better leverage the platform to drive student engagement
5. Deeply learning and understanding the higher education and career services space (operations, structure, and metrics)
6. Consulting with education partners on their workflows to help them adapt their processes to the Handshake product and achieve student success
7. Responding to detailed inquiries that require leveraging technical product knowledge combined with your strategic understanding of Handshake and our goals

Relationship Management

1. Owning the core/executive relationships and ultimate success with a defined segment of education partners
2. Cultivating meaningful, trusting relationships with key partners and relevant stakeholders
3. Effectively navigating a complex and nuanced set of relationships to build and maintain trust at scale
4. Implementing the program of recurring and on-demand touchpoints with customers
5. Traveling onsite (as needed) to support customers

Partner Success, Health, and Retention

1. Ensuring successful implementation for all new partners in your book of business
2. Ensuring high and swift renewal rates. This may include the management of detailed contracts and security requests that are nuanced to each partner
3. Driving customer value from the product
4. Implementing and executing scalable solutions to support a large book of business
5. Tracking detailed subjective health assessments to pair with data-driven account health score.
6. Leveraging data to proactively identify at risk accounts and implement action plans
7. Collaborating across the Handshake organization to ensure that customer needs are met in an efficient and timely manner
8. Understanding trends with your accounts via data reporting and dashboards and taking appropriate actions to keep account health high
9. Providing effective project management for both internal and external strategic initiatives
10. Executing implementation calls and training webinars with your education partners and relevant stakeholders
11. Using Industry landscape, current HigherEd trends, historical relationship health and product to articulate/advice/suggest clear actions

Operations and Marketing

1. Helping scale, develop, document and peer-train on internal processes to support users & peers
2. Assisting with content creation for marketing collateral to education partners
3. Developing the relevant topic, format and audience for targeted and scaled programming

Your experience

1. 2+ years of Customer Success experience
2. Proven experience with SaaS and ability to quickly learn tech stack
3. Experience working with a book of business (50+) and implementing scalable solutions to support accounts
4. Experience building relationships with customers and navigating complex or difficult conversations
5. Highly articulate, polished, and professional communicator
6. Ability to prioritize workload while maintaining high attention to detail
7. Ability to internalize changing messaging and rapidly incorporate into customer conversations
8. Highly curious with "discovery" mindset
9. High degree of technical aptitude
10. Ability to think critically and empathetically about the customer's needs
11. Add value to a team environment by demonstrating enthusiasm and a collaborative spirit
12. Adaptable to evolving business needs and willingness to contribute to process improvement
13. Analytical, methodical approach to identifying challenges and measuring impact.
14. Able to drive customer onboarding, implementation and consultation
15. Extremely detail-oriented and diligent
16. Able to receive feedback maturely and iterate quickly to continuously improve
17. Able to leverage business acumen to guide prioritization
18. Highly intuitive and high EQ
19. Able to strategize independently
20. Able to think critically about the customer's needs
21. Able to provide ideas for improving internal team structure

This role will require

1. In-office work from our San Francisco office on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays
2. 30% travel every other month

Bonus areas of expertise

1. Experience with the Handshake platform

Compensation range

1. $98,000 - $127,000

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. Handshake is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, London, and Berlin.

What we offer

At Handshake, we'll give you the tools to feel healthy, happy and secure.

Benefits below apply to employees in full-time positions.

1. Equity and ownership in a fast-growing company.
2. 16 Weeks of paid parental leave for birth giving parents & 10 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birth giving parents.
3. Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision policies including LGTBQ+ Coverage. We also provide resources for Mental Health Assistance, Employee Assistance Programs and counseling support.
4. Handshake offers $500/£360 home office stipend for you to spend during your first 3 months to create a productive and comfortable workspace at home.
5. Generous learning & development opportunities and an annual $2,000/£1,500/€1,850 stipend for you to grow your skills and career.
6. Financial coaching through Origin to help you through your financial journey.
7. Monthly internet stipend and a brand new MacBook to allow you to do your best work.
8. Monthly commuter stipend for you to expense your travel to the office (for office-based employees).
9. Free lunch provided twice a week across all offices.
10. Referral bonus to reward you when you bring great talent to Handshake.

(US-specific benefits, in addition to the first section)

1. 401k Match: Handshake offers a dollar-for-dollar match on 1% of deferred salary, up to a maximum of $1,200 per year.
2. All full-time US-based Handshakers are eligible for our flexible time off policy to get out and see the world. In addition, we offer 8 standardized holidays, and 2 additional days of flexible holiday time off. Lastly, we have a Winter #ShakeBreak, a one-week period of Collective Time Off.
3. Family support: We partner with Milk Stork to provide comprehensive 100% employer-sponsored lactation support to traveling parents and guardians. Parental leave coaching and support provided by Parentaly.

(UK-specific benefits, in addition to the first section)

1. Pension Scheme: Handshake will provide you with a workplace pension, where you will make contributions based on 5% of your salary. Handshake will pay the equivalent of 3% towards your pension plan, subject to qualifying earnings limits.
2. Up to 25 days of vacation to encourage people to reset, recharge, and refresh, in addition to 8 bank holidays throughout the year.
3. Regular offsites each year to bring the team together + opportunity to travel to our HQ in San Francisco.
4. ️ Discounts across various high street retailers, cinemas and other social activities exclusively for Handshake UK employees.

(Germany-specific benefits, in addition to the first section)

1. 25 days of annual leave + 5 days of a winter #ShakeBreak, a one-week period of Collective Time Off across the company.
2. Regular offsites each year to bring the team together + opportunity to travel to our HQ in San Francisco once a year.
3. Urban sports club membership offering access to a diverse network of fitness and wellness facilities.
4. ️ Discounts across various high street retailers, cinemas and other social activities exclusively for Handshake Germany employees.

Looking for more? Explore our mission, values and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.

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 reach out to us at