TALENT & SKILLS SPECIAL REPORT
BOOMERANG HIRES AND THE IMPORTANCE OF MAINTAINING RELATIONSHIPS WITH FORMER EMPLOYEES
T EMMA SINCLAIR MBE
he battle for talent is well documented in this issue of ERP Today and virtually all large employers are in a race against time to find, hire and onboard the staff they need to meet their obligations. Whilst there are plenty of tactics that employers can use to recruit, one overlooked pool of potential skills is a company’s own alumni - so called boomerang hires. In a break from the norm, Paul Esherwood sat down with regular ERP Today contributor, Emma Sinclair MBE, to talk about her business - EnterpriseAlumni - to find out why maintaining and maximising relationships with former employees could be the answer to the skills shortage. Reid Hoffman, infamous founder of LinkedIn, talked about alumni and lifelong relationships with former employees back in 2014. But no one digitalised it until recently… “LinkedIn. Tesla. YouTube. Yelp. Yammer. SpaceX. What do all these companies have in common? They’re not just examples of innovation and financial success. All of them were founded by the alumni of a single company: PayPal. Lifetime employment might be over, but a lifetime relationship remains the ideal, and as the alumni of PayPal have demonstrated, it can be extremely valuable. Unlike the free agency model, the alliance can and should persist even after an employee’s final tour of duty.”
Why do alumni matter? ES: Organisations devote a great deal of time and resources to onboarding new hires and retaining employees, but little effort and few resources go towards offboarding. Huge investment is made in recruitment, retention, learning and development, for example. Yet the day people leave, the departure process is typically marked with a ‘thanks, bye...’ And that’s pretty much it. Not very inspiring!
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| Q1 2022
05/02/2022 14:21
