Power of Alumni? The How Part 1

In an earlier post I discussed about Power of Alumni Networks. We spoke about how alumni can be a great source to hire from (or call it rehire) and also as brand ambassadors.  What are the ways in which you can engage with the alumni?  A few thoughts.

Alumni meets are a good way:   Bring your alumni together for a day meet once a year or every two years.   It can be a proud moment for those who have been associated with your organization.    However remember don't try to get all your alumni to the meet at once. It can never happen this way and won't serve you any good.   Do make an inherent effort to get the A' listers to attend.   These should be the one's who you valued most either performance, attitude or even discretionary contribution.   To get the clarity on A listers the segregation should happen at time of exit itself.  You need to capture this in your systems otherwise with the kind of turnover we have in organizations these days you may always find that neither manager nor HR who interfaced with a specific alumni is with you today when you need information on who is A and who is B in your target segment.

Question is what do you do when you get your alumni together.  Speak about how the company's been progressing.  Spell out strategic direction and give them opportunity to understand how much has happened over the past year.   You can also highlight changes in leadership and any new ways of doing things that would not have been existent previous  year.

The second important aspect to remember is avoid selective invitations and create a kind of inner circle feeling among alumni.   You will lose out on brand ambassadors.  Those who believe they aren't invited will actually become your brand slayers probably because of the pent up negative feeling that this kind of segregation will convey.  However if you build a segregation based on recency... say inviting alumni who have left us post year 2010 this is much more acceptable and also will serve you better chances of targeting on people who you feel you can get back to work with you.

There are other innovative ways... for example calling back all R&D folks who left us in past five  year..... or calling back production planning experts who left since 2012.   These would also serve as similar interest groups and people would know each other better and would serve as more attractive forums for them.   But it all depends on size and volumes you have for various groups and this is a function of company size, age, spread and so on. 

Even though you don't discriminate based on A,B, C Listing for invitation when it comes to engaging with any pursuit to get individual to think of coming back,  then you surely need your ABC classification.   Only pursue those on your A list.  Best 20%.   This is given a 20:40:20 classification.  You can have your own guidelines on how to build the ABC.

There are few other kinds of forums to attract back your employees who left which we will discuss in subsequent posts.

Power of Alumni? But How: Part I

There are two ways in which alumni are a great source of positive contribution to your organization.  First they are a great talent pool to hire from for key high impact areas where you can bank on this talent segment.   Second they are your brand ambassadors and more importantly so if they are working with your clients or partners other organizations who are not in your direct competitive set.

The question is how many organizations actually end up leveraging this network of alumni.  The big boys of consulting actually do it really well.  A lot of leads for their new business and connects on research projects and gathering data come from the alumni at these power houses of business consulting.  

First let us talk about rehiring alumni.  You wouldn't want everyone who worked with you in the past.  You would probably look at those were hard hitters and most valuable players in specific areas which you need to re prioritize or refocus growth or some area which requires complementary skills and capabilities which your alumni had when they left you. 

You would want those who left on good terms,  who contributed well,  who left for reasons like a better prospects or in many cases (first time job holders... especially) they leave just for getting a different perspective and may never had any push factor that drove them away.  Many of them may have been very good contributors too.

In early 2013, Yahoo Inc.  send Welcome Back packages to alumni including VP's ,  Tech Engineers and others providing them insights as to how things had changed since the days the new CEO took over. (Ref: www.techcruch.com)  The writing on the wall was clear...  We will be happy to have you back with us. 

However from practical stand point the question is what can the HR folks do to facilitate the influx of ex employees. in a later post I will be sharing seven ideas on how this can be facilitated and how you can really extend a red carpet to the folks whom you want back at the table.