Case Study: Handshake achieves turbocharged online recruiting with Looker

Handshake Uses Looker + Databricks to Turbocharge Online Recruiting

Handshake is a career network that connects 9 million students and alumni from 500 universities with over 250,000 employers, but faced the classic marketplace data problem: complex, three-sided user journeys and large, disparate data sources (clickstream, app services, Salesforce, Zendesk) with a small data team and strict security/compliance needs. The company needed a way to analyze and operationalize large-scale data without building and managing a full cluster in-house.

Handshake standardized on Spark/PySpark and adopted Databricks for managed Spark infrastructure and secure job scheduling, then layered Looker on top for modeling, in-database querying, access control, and embedded analytics. The result: democratized, cross-functional access to consistent analytics (product, sales, customer success), embedded self-service reporting in the product, faster prototyping, and improved ML-driven recommendations — all while keeping data secure and scalable for future growth.

Handshake

John Huang

Engineering and Data Analytics Lead