Case Study: Handshake achieves a single source of truth data dictionary and 3x faster analyst onboarding with Select Star

Handshake achieves single source of truth data dictionary with Select Star

Handshake, the leading early‑talent marketplace that helps college students get hired, faced a sprawling and disorganized analytics stack—700+ tables, 1,000+ Looker dashboards, and fragmented documentation that made it hard for teams to find and trust data. To avoid a costly, manual overhaul of Looker and data models, Handshake partnered with Select Star and its automated data discovery platform and collaborative data‑dictionary tools to create a single source of truth.

Select Star connected to Handshake’s stack (Looker, dbt, Snowflake/BigQuery), automatically synced metadata and query history, and surfaced searchable documentation, popularity scores, lineage, and collaboration threads so users could self‑serve. The result: faster onboarding and change management (3x faster analyst onboarding and 10x faster schema change management), measurable time savings and ROI within months, and a scalable, trusted data catalog that reduced load on the data team and improved confidence in Handshake’s analytics.

Handshake

Nicolas Soldi

Analytics Technical Lead