Ewance vs Handshake — portfolio builder vs job board

Ewance vs Handshake.

Handshake dominates the US student career platform space. Founded in 2014 by three Michigan Tech students — Garrett Lord, Ben Christensen, and Scott Ringwelski — and headquartered in San Francisco, Handshake now connects 20 million knowledge workers with 1,600+ educational institutions and 1 million employers. It's a job board with employer outreach baked in. It's not a credential issuer or a pedagogy. The honest framing: Handshake and Ewance are complementary, not competitive.

What Handshake does.

Handshake operates as a three-sided marketplace — students, universities, and employers. Students create free accounts to find internships, fresher jobs, and on-campus recruiting events; universities integrate Handshake into their career-services workflow; employers post roles and run recruiting campaigns. The platform spans 1,600+ institutions and over a million employers, with offices in San Francisco, New York, the United Kingdom, and Bangalore.

The strength is distribution. If you're a US student approaching graduation, Handshake is where the early-career pipeline at major employers actually flows. The mid-tier consulting firms, the regional banks, the technology graduate-scheme employers — all run on-campus recruiting through it.

Handshake is a career-search-and-discovery surface. It is not designed to evaluate work, issue credentials, or run challenge-based learning programmes. Those aren't its product.

Where Ewance is different.

Two different categories. The frame matters: this isn't 'Ewance vs Handshake' — it's 'where each fits in the student journey.'

Career discovery vs portfolio building.

Handshake helps a student find and apply to jobs. Ewance helps a student build the portfolio that gets shortlisted for those jobs. The two artefacts are different: a Handshake profile is an application surface; an Ewance credential is a verifiable record of work the student has shipped. They show up at different points in a recruiter's funnel.

Credential layer

Profile-as-CV vs credential-as-proof.

A Handshake profile collects what the student says they've done. An Ewance credential is signed by the platform that watched them ship the work, anchored on-chain by LearnCoin, and verifiable independently. When a recruiter on Handshake asks ‘show me the work,’ the W3C Verifiable Credentials anchored to that work are what they actually want to see.

Timing

Pre-graduation vs throughout the degree.

Handshake is most useful in the eighteen months before graduation. Ewance is useful from the first semester onward. The portfolio you take to a Handshake recruiter when you graduate is built challenge by challenge during the years before you ever open a job application.

When to choose Handshake.

You're graduation-adjacent and shopping for full-time roles, internships, or graduate-scheme placements.

You want employer outreach and on-campus recruiting events, particularly at US institutions where Handshake has deep integration.

Your university's career services run on Handshake and that's where the pipeline flows.

For career discovery and applications, Handshake's reach across 1,600+ institutions is the practical answer.

When to choose Ewance (and Handshake).

You want to build the portfolio that Handshake recruiters ask to see — well before you apply.

You're earlier in your academic track and not yet ready for full job-shopping.

You want credentials that signal completed work, not just sent applications — the artefact a recruiter clicks through to from your Handshake profile.

Many students should use both: Ewance to build the portfolio, Handshake to find the job. They sit at different points in the same student journey.

The honest framing is and-not-or.