Why alumni talent is a cost-effective, impactful hiring source

By design, Human Resources (HR) and recruitment teams have long operated on separate systems and worked in their own lanes. Typically, HR has focused internally, working with current employees and focusing on employee retention, while recruitment has had an external focus—looking to hire successful talent. 

But when an employee departs an organisation, both HR and recruitment are affected. HR needs to offboard the employee, while recruitment will need to hire a replacement. 

So while recruitment and HR may address different stages of the talent journey, there are instances where both teams can work together to hire quickly and more effectively. Enter alumni talent.

What is alumni talent and why actively build it into your talent strategy?

Alumni talent is a collective noun for all the employees who have departed your organisation—think ex-employees. When a person leaves, they take with them skills and knowledge—both information about your organisation and the expertise your company needs to thrive. 

It typically takes 70% of organisations between one and four months to fill a role, which creates increased demand on the talent acquisition (TA) team and for the organisation as a whole. 

Talent Acquisition is always under pressure to fill positions quickly because open roles mean work is not being done. This puts strain on the rest of the organisation as it tries to maintain performance and achieve goals. 

Tapping into alumni talent is a creative way to tackle labour shortages. During tighter economic cycles, recruitment is the first to have budgets slashed, and have headcount reduced. 

However, when hiring freezes are lifted, recruitment teams are expected to fill open roles quickly.

By tapping into a talent pool of former employees, hiring teams can reduce time to hire.

Knowing who has left, and why, can inform future hiring

Given that recruitment and HR teams are at different stages of the talent lifecycle, it’s not unexpected that a recruiter may have little knowledge on departing employees and the reasons why these employees leave. 

When it comes to offboarding talent, HR may send an exit survey (or conduct an exit interview), but recruitment is left out in the rain with little to no knowledge over whether the talent leaving is worth remembering, and worth targeting for rehire.

Recruitment tends to be sheltered from turnover trends, but this information can be vital when replacing a role the next time around. 

When an employee leaves a company, it pays to share the reasons behind the decision to leave. This can lead to a company culture of organisational improvement, improved employee engagement and stronger future hiring.

Imagine when roles become available, you made it part of your recruitment process to understand why the role is empty and who might be interested in filling it. Imagine if you had access to a pool of people who wanted to hear from you. 

“Attracting talent back into the organisation is one of the many strategies and talent levers that [organisations] should be pulling” says Anna Hodges, End-to-End Talent Leader at Woolworths Group.

Furthermore, because alumni talent have pre-existing knowledge of your organisation, they are faster to onboard, should you choose to rehire. 

Benefits of alumni talent

As the person or team who hires talent, recruitment teams are in one of the best positions to create organisational change and encourage a work environment of ex-employees returning.

Rehiring alumni talent can:

• Be cost-effective: Save on advertisement spend, agency fees, time spent on search and interviewing. Overall reduced time to hire.
  

• Have instant impact: By tapping into a pool of people who know your organisation, their pre-existing knowledge can make alumni talent faster to onboard should you choose to re-hire.

• Offer new ideas: They may have not enjoyed everything about the role(s) they left, but you can bet that there may be new processes, systems, or ideas they can implement with you - helping to fuel further innovation and organisation efficiency.
  

• Promote long-term stays: Sometimes the grass isn’t greener so alumni talent may be very keen to return. You may find alumni talent will be less receptive to future external approaches because they know what is out there. 

• Overcome talent shortages: At a recent webinar hosted by Xref New Zealand, the topic of utilising alumni employees to overcome talent shortages was raised. Panellist Zubair Mohammed, Recruitment Manager at The Farmers Trading Company Ltd noted that boomerang talent may act as brand advocates bringing new talent back with them.

So where do I start?

To maximise the benefit of your alumni talent, start by creating a culture of alumni talent and if possible, boomerang employees.

Alumni talent are people who have left your organisation. Boomerang talent is departed talent who rejoin your organisation. 

The talent acquisition team is best positioned to influence change in the hiring process. They can learn from instances of re-hiring ex-employees and use success stories to gain executive buy-in.

As Anna Hodges from Woolworths explains, Talent Acquisition teams are “the best influencers in the business.”

Executives, leaders, and managers set the tone. Be open, be loud, and be transparent. Create a culture that encourages your people to grow and seek development opportunities, and if they choose to depart, make it clear that the door is always open for their return. 

Next, keep track of reasons why an employee decides to leave. Collect the data and make this accessible to all departments across your organisation. Is the departing employee a regretful leaver for example?

Knowing more about employee experiences and why people leave is key to making positive organisational change that can not only improve retention of current employees but also encourage departed employees to return. 

Finally, make it part of your exit interview process to build a pool of alumni talent. Ask departing individuals if they agree to be contacted by your organisation if a relevant position becomes available. Find out how your business can stay in touch with an ex-employee. Consider what would be an appropriate “check-in” period. 

‍Nova Systems, for example, have even created awards for boomerangers which does a great job at raising the profile and business appetite for talent that may regret their move away, to come back ‘home’.

How Xref can help

While HR and recruitment may address different parts of the talent journey, Xref can simplify this and help you recruit, retain and remember your talent all in one place. 

Xref allows you to automate your reference and background checks, and your exit surveys, creating great synergies between talent acquisition and HR.

You can send exit surveys as talent is leaving, or retrospectively survey past leavers to help generate immediate organisational insights and build a talent pool of verified alumni talent to actively pursue.

In addition, an Xref Exit Survey tracks a departing employee’s skill set and asks current hiring managers to rate employees before they are added to talent pools. This gives future hiring managers comprehensive data to work with.

Xref’s Talent Pool feature functions on an ‘opt-in’ basis allowing your departing employees to share contact information if they wish to return. The Xref talent pool will store insights on preferred future roles, making it easy for Talent Acquisition to filter and sort alumni candidates for open roles. 

Final thoughts

Alumni make the most cost-effective, impactful source of talent because they are a known quantity to your organisation. Getting the most out of your alumni talent pool requires talent acquisition and human resources teams to work together.

Alumni talent enables companies to take advantage of existing knowledge of business processes, and hit productivity far quicker in comparison to a new hire, even if there is a cost premium to recruit that person back. 

Xref offers Exit Surveys to help track reasons for leaving and allows organisations to create an alumni talent pool. Effective talent management and a work culture that encourages departing employees to return, will have a stronger talent pool, ultimately reducing time to hire in future.