Workforce reductions are one of the hardest decisions a leader has to make. Unfortunately, in the current economic climate, it is a decision from which few of us are immune.  Leaders want to ease the transition and communicate that they still value their people, including those who are leaving. Creating a secure, private, branded employee social network where your former employees can stay connected to your company and each other sends a powerful message about the value you place on your company’s people. This delivers real value back to your business and ensures you don’t lose touch as they are walking out the door

In a recent article published by Forbes, “Keeping Ex-Employees Brand Loyal,”  the author suggests taking a second look at your company’s exit process and your alumni program.

“The manner in which companies part ways with their employees has a potent and lasting effect on the former employee, employees who remain, and the brand.  A strong alumni program becomes an important part of the exit process. Former employees join a community that can help them as they continue with their careers–no matter where they go. Be sure to introduce exiting employees to, and enroll them in, the alumni program before they leave.

A powerful exit strategy and alumni program is a gift that keeps on giving. Promoting good relationships with your employees, before, during, and after their time on the payroll encourages a healthy brand. In return for helping alumni with professional relationships, the pursuit of higher education or specialized training, or even finding a new job at your company or elsewhere, you’ll gain brand ambassadors whose worth is immeasurable.”

Attracting and retaining top talent amid shifting workforce dynamics is an increasingly difficult endeavor for human capital and talent management leadership. An engaged and active alumni community, leveraging Conenza’s corporate social networking software solution and services, can help you meet recruiting and retention challenges head on.

Omowale Casselle examined the pros and cons of using social networking and social media tools for recruiting in her blog post "Social Recruiting Is Only Cheap Right Now ." Here at Conenza we are focused on building lifelong relationships with  employees to increase business development opportunities and recruiting efficiency.

Employee Time/Energy Is A Real Cost

"Social Recruiting is not cheap from the perspective of resources expended. Unless your recruiting team is filled with volunteers, Social Recruiting is not free or cheap. The main reason being the amount of time it takes to properly define, get buy-in, execute, measure, and repeat a campaign. Much of the time it takes to conduct these initiatives is because of the existing fragmentation of social media tools. From maintaining a Facebook fan page, tweeting on Twitter, writing blog posts, searching for candidates on LinkedIn, and monitoring Google Analytics; the recruiting team can spend a significant amount of time  and energy on these free tools. Individual company recruiting teams that are taking a leadership role in this new space are developing solutions that don’t necessarily scale well. In fact, one could argue that it is in their best interest not to share strategic elements which are most beneficial to recruiting top talent via social media."

Discover why the world’s leading Global 2000 enterprises rely on Conenza’s corporate social networking software and expert community-building services to build and manage their employee and alumni communities .  It hurts when you lose employees, especially star performers, but this does not have to be the end of the relationship or the value that they create for your organization. Smart organizations are actually reframing how they look at the departure of an employee, maintaining connections and continuing to tap into their knowledge, connections, and commitment to do great work.

Event Archive: The Application of Enterprise Social Networking to Talent Acquisition and Management
Speaker: Katherine James Schuitemaker , Chief Marketing Officer , Conenza, Inc.

Every day global organizations are adopting social networking technologies to increase collaboration and improve organizational efficiencies. These collective workforce communities can enable large companies to tap into the knowledge and connections of current and former employees to drive significant business impact. Successful implementations report enhanced collaboration and communication, increased recruiting and talent management efficiency, and retained access of valuable intellectual capital.

How can talent acquisition leaders leverage this and apply to talent management and recruitment efforts? We will walk through the different types of communities that are being adopted within the enterprise, and the impact they can have on talent management programs.

To view this webinar or for more information on Conenza’s corporate social networking solution or getting started with the Conenza Community Core, please visit http://conenza.com.

In today’s challenging economic environment, companies are looking for ways to increase efficiency and cut costs. A corporate alumni and employee social network can enable companies to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with exiting, retiring, and former employees, and provide a compelling source of competitive advantage for global organizations in strategic outplacement, recruiting/re-recruiting, retained access to domain expertise, business development, and high-value marketing.

“The business case for a private alumni and employee community in normal economic times is one that is extremely compelling; in an economic downturn it becomes a strategic imperative. The Conenza Community Core provides corporations with a simple and affordable way to maintain valuable connections with their people, past and present, in a branded, secure environment,” said Tony Audino, Conenza CEO. “For more than a decade, our technology and support services have enabled some of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies, like Microsoft, to build and grow vibrant online communities that deliver real benefits to the members and positively impact both the top and bottom line.”

The Conenza Community Core 3.0 includes:

* Community Building Blocks: The Conenza Community Core includes the quintessential building blocks of a community: secure member registration and authentication, directories, profiles, news, and administration and reporting.
* Social Computing Features: The Conenza Community Core includes social computing features such as groups, connections, messaging, wikis, blogs, activity feeds, and document sharing.
* Strategic Support Services: Conenza’s Software-as-a-Service solution licensing fee includes expert consulting services to help clients develop their community strategy, provide day-to-day support, and quickly realize the full financial benefits of their initiatives.
* Customization to Meet Business and Brand Requirements: The Conenza Community Core is configurable to comply with corporate brand standards and features content moderation and permissioning capabilities to meet the robust needs of various audiences inside and outside the enterprise.
* Modular Upgrades: Value-enhancing modules can be easily added to the Conenza Community Core to improve the effectiveness of critical human resources, sales and marketing initiatives, and increase the business value derived from a private, branded alumni and employee community. Add-on modules include the Opportunity Center, Events, and Marketplaces.

For more information on Conenza’s corporate social networking solution or getting started with the Conenza Community Core, visit http://conenza.com.

The impact of social media cannot be denied. The 2009 word of the year was “tweet,” and the word of the decade was “google,” according to the American Dialect Society. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube–which are defined by their user-generated content–have wiggled their way into most people’s working hours, and thus onto many workplace computers.

One of the biggest issues caused by social media during an employee tenure is the simple theft of working time. There are also matters of privacy, nondisclosure, taboo topics and hostile work environment, brand protection, and many more. The good news is, this is the stage when you have the most control over the situation. Most organizations would benefit from a well-researched, clear, and fairly applied social media policy.

Another huge issue is recommendations. Increasingly, people are asking former colleagues to write them recommendations on social media such as LinkedIn. Is that the same as an official post-employment recommendation? Jackson says yes–although it’s difficult to define when people are speaking for themselves, and when they are speaking on behalf of the organization. It’s a good reason to have a solid policy in place.

The warmest and fuzziest scenario is positive relations through social media in the form of corporate alumni networks. In Computer World’s article, “The new word for tech’s ex-employees is ‘alum’” large, successful sites catering to groups of ex-employees are examined. Microsoft’s alumni network, for example, has 10,000 members–what an incredible opportunity for networking and goodwill!

Conenza sees the value in alumni social networks and provides corporate strategic planning and social networking community software. Read the full article here.

For more information please visit our site at http://conenza.com

Existing open social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, offer aggregated pools of potential registrants for your official Alumni Network. To the extent that alumni on these sites may not be aware of the official site and the advantages of being members of the official Alumni Network, they are targeted prospects potentially responsive to marketing outreach on these key social networking sites.

LinkedIn

Setup an Alumni Group in LinkedIn

The primary purpose of this low-cost tactic is to link group members to the official Alumni site. The LinkedIn Alumni Group logo will appear in LinkedIn member profiles, attracting other potential members to click on the link and go to the official Alumni Network site.

To make this an especially powerful capture and conversion vehicle, Conenza recommends creating a landing page customized to users coming from LinkedIn, This landing page would incorporate a welcome and encouragement to join the official site from a senior executive, a short bulleted pitch on the features and benefits of joining and a link to the logged-out homepage.  These steps will help provide a clean and compelling transition from the LinkedIn site to your official Alumni Network. If the landing page is hosted on the Conenza servers, traffic and activity analytics can be added to the custom landing page to track effectiveness, click-throughs and conversion to registered members.

Facebook

Explore ways to participate and create links back to the alumni site

There are likely many members in the unofficial Alumni Group for your company if one has been set up on Facebook. As a no-cost tactic to reach these alums, you should consider reaching out to the admin for the unofficial group and provide the admin with the correct link to the official Alumni Network site, as well as provide the admin with a link to a special landing page for Facebook-registered alums (a Facebook version of the landing page described above), welcoming the alums to register as a member of the official Alumni Network, inviting them to partake of all the benefits that are not available on Facebook and connecting them to thousands of additional friends and colleagues.

In the Future

Create lightweight LinkedIn and Facebook applications for the Alumni Network

The idea: using Facebook’s or LinkedIn API to create a lightweight application that resides on the respective sites could deliver breaking info to social network members on official Alumni news, events, job postings, all linking back to the official Alumni Network. An application of this type, available for download at the Facebook, LinkedIn and Alumni Network sites could help drive adoption by requiring registration on the Alumni site. Whether LinkedIn would approve the use of this application on their site remains to be seen.

Over the coming months, Conenza will continue exploring ways to make it easy for LinkedIn and Facebook members to bring appropriate elements of their profiles with them into the Conenza-managed Alumni Networks, helping to enrich the online communities of its customers and fuel additional value creation opportunities for members and sponsors.

By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza

We have been getting a lot of questions lately regarding key things to consider and plan for when launching a new corporate alumni program. Over the last decade, while working with some of the world’s leading companies to build and manage private, branded online alumni communities, Conenza has identified seven significant keys to success. We will be sharing these steps with you as part of this two part series. In this post we will be digging into steps one through three, and next week we will tackle four through seven.

1) Clearly outline your business objectives

Corporate Alumni Programs can deliver compelling business benefits across the enterprise:
• increased recruiting efficiency,
• retained access to valuable knowledge and know-how,
• new and highly-effective channels for business development, marketing and research.

When launching a new initiative it is important to focus on and clearly define the primary business drivers for your community. Doing this at the start will help you build a program that is designed to quickly maximize the impact. As most of our clients have found, the benefits that you realize from your community will evolve and expand over time, and we recommend that when you are getting started you should: focus, prove success quickly, and then expand the impact and value.

2) Establish measurable goals for your alumni community

Once you have outlined what you want to achieve through your corporate alumni initiative, it is critical to define how you are going to measure and report on your community success. In a recent Human Capital Institute webinar, Excelling at Corporate Alumni Relations, Dr. John Sullivan gave some great examples of metrics to consider:

Example of Recruiting and HR Metrics
1. Percentage rate of boomerang rehires (alumni who come back to the business)
2. Average performance rating of boomerangs
3. Diversity rate of boomerangs
4. Time to productivity of boomerangs
5. # of successful hires from alumni referrals

Example of Business Impact Metrics
1. Sales referrals attributed to alumni
2. $ of sales attributed to alumni
3. # of beta products tested
4. Ideas captured

Example of General Program Metrics
1. Program ROI
2. % of targeted alumni that actively participate
3. Manager satisfaction with the program
4. Alumni satisfaction with the program
5. Alumni perception of the firm

At Conenza, we have also found that defining goals and metrics around the health of your online community are equally as important. Metrics like # of active members, # of connections made, and volume of member-contributed content, can help you measure how your community is growing, how engaged are its members, and marketing effectiveness.

3) Build an alumni community infrastructure that helps you quickly and cost-effectively achieve your goals

When building the infrastructure to support and grow a corporate alumni program, there are two critical questions an organization will need to answer and plan for:

1) What technology will we use to help us achieve the goals of the program?
2) How can we effectively integrate the program into our current business processes?

When it comes to technology, there are several different approaches and solutions for building an online corporate alumni community, so many choices in fact that it may be overwhelming. To simplify things it’s helpful to think in terms of whether the technology makes it easier to achieve your community goals. For example, if re-recruitment is a primary goal, does the community solution you are looking at provide an easy way to display open opportunities, target qualified candidates, and track the success of your efforts? Does it allow your community members to effectively display their unique skill sets and experience?

Another leading requirement for our enterprise clients is often around the privacy and security of their community and their data. They want to create a trusted environment where people feel comfortable connecting and collaborating and where they know the privacy of their data will be respected. The recent controversy around the Facebook Terms of Use really put a spotlight on how important it is for people to trust that their data privacy will be respected as they interact within an online social network.

Driving adoption of your community internally is critical to your community’s success. Some of the most successful programs we have seen have put a strong focus on integrating their alumni program with the existing internal business processes. Sales people are programmed to do an alumni search when targeting a new prospect or expand existing business to identify “friendly” contacts. The on-boarding process highlights the lifetime relationships that the company hopes to build with its people as demonstrated by the alumni community. Research efforts tap into alumni resources.

Some of the ways we have seen clients gain rapid internal adoption for their programs are to:
• Enlist and promote C-level support from the program’s onset
• Establish an “Alumni Community Taskforce” with stakeholders from across the enterprise and focused on key impact areas: recruitment, business development, marketing
• Create an internal program information portal and make this highly visible on company Intranet
• Integrate the community platform with internal systems: HR systems, sales & marketing systems
• Add alumni community metrics to standard business reporting

In next week’s post we will take a look at steps 4-7. In the mean time if you would like to take a look at a detailed presentation on the seven steps we are highlighting as part of this series you can register and download it here.

By Brian Donaldson, VP, Account Management, Conenza 

Prior to joining Conenza, I spent 10 years at Microsoft. It was while I was there that I experienced firsthand how a Corporate Alumni Community can make the life of a hiring manager easier.

I was always looking for talent that could spin up and be productive quickly. With the constant backlog of projects on my plate, I could not afford to wait the weeks, or even months, it could take to hire and onboard new talent. I needed to increase my team’s capacity fast.

It was in a brainstorming session with my recruiting team on how to solve the recruiting time and the ramp time problem that I first learned of the “Microsoft Alumni Network.” Microsoft was an early pioneer in this arena, launching its corporate alumni community in 1995, long before the world of enterprise social networking as we know it. At the time of our meeting, Microsoft was beginning to actively leverage this community as a source of talent. This made a lot of sense to me. Former employees know the company, culture, products, prospects, and customers. They shouldn’t need as much time to ramp up and become productive. I was definitely willing to give it a try.

We developed detailed profiles and project descriptions and posted them to the alumni web site. Within days, not months, we were able to source several great alumni candidates. Because these new hires, or boomerangs as they are sometimes referred to, understood how to operate and get things done inside Microsoft, they were able to add value and make a real impact quickly. It was a simple solution that made a profound impact. I was able to cut my team’s time to productivity and make a dent in that backlog of projects while reducing our overall recruiting spend.

This was how I personally discovered the value of tapping into corporate alumni community as rehires. For me, it was so compelling that I decided to join the company that helped me and Microsoft make it happen.:)

By Jennie Ellis, SPHR, Conenza

Starting out in recruiting over 15 years ago, the tools I had at my disposal were an old mainframe, custom-built database and a hard copy of the yellow pages. The only way I could find out about a Senior Developer at X,Y,Z Company was if I could somehow convince the receptionist to give me the name!

Web 2.0 recruiting has been a hot topic in the blogosphere for some time now and it can be a powerful HR strategy. When I think back to early 2004 when I first registered for Plaxo and LinkedIn, I am impressed by the rapid adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, like blogs, podcasts, and social networking by both individuals and companies alike.

Today, as a Recruiting Strategist, my life is much different when trying to find top talent and it is really exciting to be at the forefront of Web 2.0 recruiting and see these strategic recruiting tactics in action.

I have seen our clients increase their recruiting efficiency and reduce their costs by launching corporate social networking initiatives focused on their alumni and employees. By creating official online talent communities where their current and former employees can stay connected and continue to build ongoing relationships they have been able to:

* Identify, locate, re-connect, and re-recruit their top performing former employees.
* Encourage and incent alumni-driven candidate referrals.
* Gain access to a highly capable contingent workforce and the deep advisory expertise of alumni.
* Distinguish their employment brand by sending the message to both current and former employees that people are a key asset within their organization. 
* Stay in touch with and re-recruit top diversity talent.

What I love is that all the hard work that a recruiter does to attract the right people isn’t lost when the person chooses to move to another role outside of the organization. The company can continue to leverage the relationship and trust built with that employee to create value for their business and the individual.

Our CMO, Katherine James Schuitemaker wrote a great article on how an employee and alumni community can help your strategic recruiting efforts. I would encourage you to read it.