By: Jared Gudnason

September 1, 2025

If you walk through the front doors of Metro State’s library, take a hard right. If you’re able, head up the fewer-than-ten steps to Room 150, which houses the Career Center. For clarity, by “front doors,” I mean the entrance on Seventh Street. This does not refer to the doors leading to the library parking lot adjacent to the Gordon Parks Art Gallery, which was formerly located on the third floor of the library. For academic reference, the Seventh Street doors are accessible with a university ID only before 10 a.m. Just so you know, within the past two years, the Career Center has entered a financial partnership with Handshake, Inc.

The company is headquartered at 225 Bush Street, located in San Francisco’s financial district. It also maintains secondary offices in New York City, London, and Berlin. At the bottom of joinhandshake.com, there is a discreet link to its “About” page. Beyond the cover photo collage, you’ll find a blurb written by Garrett Lord, the chief executive officer. It opens with a tone of linguistic presumption and concludes with a subtle ultimatum, followed by this statement: “[Now] Gen Z is taking over the workforce.” Four sentences later, Mr. Lord writes, “We’ve built a new social network where opportunity and inspiration meet.” The message feels more authoritative than opportunistic, particularly when considering our student body, whether undergraduate or graduate.

While I was still earning modest paychecks as a library employee at Metro, I logged onto Handshake for the first time. Although uploading a résumé, similar to the process on Indeed.com, is Handshake’s preferred method, I chose instead to initiate a search for copywriting and editing jobs. One of the first results was a writing position based in Sacramento, California. The pay was $200 per month, exactly $120 more than I earned from my paper route in the early 2000s.

What concerns me is the exclusivity of an online employment platform that is marketed specifically toward a narrowly defined group of students. With the capital to acquire real estate in some of the wealthiest cities in the world, it seems unlikely that Handshake would consider changing its model entirely. My general concern stems from a sense of perceived authority, coming from a company founded by three white men eleven years ago that has now partnered with a university rich in employment potential. Mr. Lord wrote that Handshake “challenged the status quo again.”

With any major shift in the workforce, it’s only a matter of time before those driving the change become a new version of the very reference they once challenged. The proprietary tone of Handshake suggests that consent may not be required when distributing an uploaded résumé. According to a video posted on their YouTube channel two weeks ago, this process will be rapidly expanded with the launch of Handshake AI. From the perspective of a selective job seeker, the opportunity to earn within a capitalist system should be considered a fundamental right, provided it respects the full and autonomous consent of every potential employee.