Tracking a Boomerang
Metrics to Guide Corporate Alumni Network Success
In People Ops, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can get the most out of our workforce. There’s another group that can add almost as much value, though, and companies are starting to take notice. While some call them “ex employees”, it’s time to call them by a more appropriate name: alumni.
Gone are the days where employees leave companies, never to interact with them again. With the advent of social networks like LinkedIn, and the frequent job changes of the modern worker, our professional connections are rarely severed the way they used to be.
As a result, corporate alumni networks have been exploding in popularity. The benefits of such networks are well-documented: they boost your brand as an employer, provide a source of return candidates (dubbed “boomerang” employees) and referrals, help you maintain a bank of valuable industry knowledge, and even generate a list of potential sales contacts.
These benefits vary across different companies, though, and maintaining an alumni network costs time and money. People Ops professionals need to measure the return on such networks in their company’s unique context, and conventional community engagement metrics like impressions and clicks are not well suited to alumni groups. Instead, it’s best to track numbers directly related the company’s goals when they created the network.
For example, one of our clients created an alumni network in hopes of improving their hiring pipeline. When the Executive team was asked how successful this endeavor had been, they realized they had no way of knowing. Yes, the People team knew they had a fairly active LinkedIn group, and had heard anecdotally of more boomerang employees “flying back”, but they had no way of quantifying these results.
They brought us in to help. Given that the company’s goal was to improve their hiring pipeline, we suggested they analyze the following:
- Alumni application rates
- Alumni referrals
- Quality of new hires
If we could find an increased quantity and quality of applications, referrals, and hires as a result of the alumni network, that would clearly demonstrate its value. If not, the team could reassess whether the network was worth the investment. A barrier to this analysis was that the company’s applicant tracking system (ATS) had no “alumni referral” or “alumni network” options to indicate where candidates heard about opportunities. Similarly, their human resource information system (HRIS) had no way of delineating who was a rehired “boomerang” employee.
This is a barrier that People Ops runs into a lot: when you don’t have the data, you can’t run the right analyses. Fortunately, we found a solution. First, we changed the company’s hiring questionnaire to collect this information going forward. Second, we cross-referenced referrer, applicant, and current employee names with past employee names in order to backfill the needed historic data.
With this data we were able to conduct our analyses, and found some exciting results. While the quantity of additional applications that could be attributed to the alumni network was not very large, those applications were five times more likely to be successful, and led to higher quality hires. Based on these results, the company invested even more into their network, providing gift cards to alumni for referrals and allowing alumni to opt into email lists for roles they might be interested in.
While we managed to backfill historical data with an interesting technical solution, this is outside the expertise of most People Ops teams. Even with the technical expertise, having the time to piece together historic data is another story. Since there’s so much value in harnessing an alumni network, we need to move beyond these post-hoc solutions. Instead, we should be building the infrastructure to leverage alumni metrics directly into our people technology products.
Investing in and maintaining an alumni network is a strategic decision, and like all strategic decisions, technology should be empowering us to make the right ones. Let’s work together to ensure that alumni get the place they deserve not only in our people systems, but in our workforce planning as well.
