When we were researching our book, “Exceptional Talent”, it became apparent that boomerang hiring and proactive alumni relations were areas of massively untapped potential for most employers.
My guest this week is Lee Caraher, Founder and CEO of PR and Influencer Marketing Agency Double Forte. Boomerang hirings and alumni relations have played an enormous role in the success of Lee’s agency. So much so that she has written a book on the topic, “The Boomerang Principle.”
In the interview we discuss:
• The strategic advantage companies gain via boomerang hiring
• Modern job tenure challenges and changing attitudes towards leavers
• The importance of owning your alumni network
• The power of relationship continuity and high-quality content
Lee also gives her definition of a high-performance culture and shares her views on the future of work.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:48]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:23]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 133 of the Recruiting Future podcast. When we were researching our book Exceptional Talent, it became really clear that boomerang hiring and proactive alumni relations were areas of massive untapped potential for the vast majority of employers. My guest this week is Lee Caraher, founder and CEO of PR and influencer marketing agency DoubleForte. Boomerang hiring and alumni relations have played a huge part in the success of Lee’s agency. So much so she’s actually written a book on the subject called the Boomerang Principle. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:02:11]:
Hi Lee, and welcome to the podcast.
Lee Caraher [00:02:13]:
Matt, thank you so much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
My absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Lee Caraher [00:02:20]:
Sure. My name is Lee Caraher. I’m the CEO and founder of a public relations and influencer marketing firm in the United States, based in San Francisco in New York. And my other job is writing book and consulting and giving speeches about culture and how to build great teams that are cross generation based on my own experience of failing miserably and then sort of cracking the code on it.
Matt Alder [00:02:49]:
So your latest book’s called the Boomerang Principle?
Lee Caraher [00:02:53]:
Yes.
Matt Alder [00:02:53]:
What’s the Boomerang Principle? Tell us about it.
Lee Caraher [00:02:56]:
Sure. The Boomerang Principle is that those organizations that allow and encourage former employees to return to them have a strategic advantage over those that don’t. In a nutshell, that is the principle.
Matt Alder [00:03:10]:
What is that strategic advantage?
Lee Caraher [00:03:12]:
The strategic advantage is all on culture, is all on the. On the leg up on Talent and recruiting. So today we imagine, we know, actually we don’t have to imagine at all. We know that people do not plan to stay in organizations as long as perhaps we’d like them to for a whole bunch host of reasons. And we’re always upset when they leave on their schedule, not on our schedule. Right. So. And for the millennial and Gen Z audience around the globe, they are not anticipating staying long in a job. However, when you have created a place that people want to return to, you have created a place that people have a hard time leaving. And if you can keep a great employee one extra year than their plan, you have advanced your company, you have saved yourself money and you have created a very positive culture. So every time you have a place where people look to return to for their careers, you are in a strategic advantage in terms of profit, in terms of recruiting, and in terms of partnership opportunity in the market that you’re in.
Matt Alder [00:04:26]:
That’s really interesting.
Matt Alder [00:04:26]:
And you know, I’ve done a sort of lot of work myself, myself, looking at, you know, employee experience and culture and sort of boomerang hiring and alumni relations is always a big part of that. But it seems that, that many organizations don’t have a plan for it or don’t know how to do it. You know, why is that? Is it, is it, is it too difficult or is it just not on people’s radar?
Lee Caraher [00:04:51]:
I think it’s a carryover from an older point of view which was, you know, if you leave me, you’re de to me, which is so short sighted. We cannot imagine in today’s world where AI and machine learning and technology is changing all of our careers, that we could keep people in our companies as long, you know, for their whole careers at all and we could keep them interested. But we can obviously imagine that people would be useful and valuable to us many, many times over a 40, 50, 60 year career, which is where we’re all headed. So I think the old idea of you leave me, you’re dead to me, I’m never going to have you back is sort of lingering. Also the idea from the baby boomer generation, which I am the last year of, where there were just so many of us that we didn’t have to really worry about it. There were a lot of people and the dynamic of today’s younger workforce is, could not be more opposite than the boomerang. The boomerang, sorry, the boomer philosophy of career. So we’re just not ready for it. I think the other piece is that those companies who have done it, who have put resources and you actually don’t need a lot of resource to make this work, are reaping the rewards. Not just in boomerang employees, coming back to them as employees, but also in partners, in clients, in business development. And if we can get past the old mindset and get to the new mindset, which is why aren’t we focusing on keeping people loyal to our companies for their whole lives, not just when we pay them? Because by definition, that’s not loyalty, that’s a transaction. As soon as we do that, the world opens up to all of us.
Matt Alder [00:06:43]:
Amazingly, this is obviously something that you’ve sort of done yourself in practice. How should companies go about doing it? What works and also perhaps what doesn’t work? When you’re sort of looking at this.
Lee Caraher [00:06:56]:
Kind of approach, I think the first thing you need to do is create an alumni network for yourself that you manage on LinkedIn. There are no shortage of sort of alumni groups that are run by rogue former employees, disgruntled or not. And so you’re not doing anything, not doing yourselves any favors if you’re not creating an environment where your former employees can be a part of. So first is to create an online corporate alumni network. And for companies, there are several systems that you can do off the shelf that you could employ. And I think those are probably good if you have at least 500 former employees, alumni, anything under that, you could use Facebook, Facebook groups, or work groups. And that’s a private network that you can control who comes in and what the activity is. But the idea is that one you keep connected to you. So as they leave the assuming that they are an employee you would want to bring back, as they leave your organization, you are welcoming them into the alumni network. You send them an email, you send them an invitation to this online network. And some people give them a T shirt. Right, Alumni kind of thing. But you have this idea of continuity that someone will be in relationship with you and your organization for much longer than you are paying them. So that’s the first piece. The second piece is sort of honoring your alumni over time. So why would you want to join this network? Well, the network is beneficial for personal and for professional reasons. And much like a university has a commonality of culture of experience, corporations and organizations have a commonality, even a language, of what that means. And the more we find those meaningful connections, either in our personal or our professional life, you know, sort of the richer opportunities we have. What you should not do is count on someone else to do this for you, you should put some resource against this. And this can just be in. This can be in the communications department. This can be in HR in general. If you think about your employees as a communication audience and then your customers as the next one. I like to think of the former employees as actually the second ring. Your own employees, your former employees, then your customers as the ring of communication there. So you can. The things that you would tell your employees, you just sort of clean up from the things that are confidential and you can share with your former employees. The best program in the world is McKinsey’s and McKinsey. What they do, they have in every office in the world for McKinsey, they have at least one person dedicated to their alumni. And of course, their business model is predicated on this, right? McKinsey, you get a job, you hire McKinsey, you know, basically, it’s this kind of thing. But they are amazing at this. So they have a private network. They host all their research that they do goes to their alumni network. Second, right? And host bimonthly, every other week, they host a web webinar on the research that’s coming out of their institute or something like that. And this is a way to keep the information that McKinsey is generating, generating from their consulting, you know, sort of in the family and propagated. They host. They have a monthly email that goes out to these people. They have, you know, quarterly events around the world. So they’re keeping people close to them. And when they have an opening in their own organization or in a client’s organization, they post it there first. Well, wow. If you post the job there first before you even call an outside recruiter, someone will go, Matt. You might say, matt, oh my gosh, I just met Lee. She would be great for that job. And you have shortcutted. You shortcutted the time and you’ve totally saved money. So for my own company, we have it in. My company is almost 16 years old. We have about 75 to 80 alumni, and we’re a small company and we have ours on Facebook. So I post all jobs on Facebook in our Facebook work group first, our private network first. And we have cut our recruiting costs by about 50% and we’ve cut our recruiting time by months. So every single time we do that. And then if someone sends us a person, we actually bonus that person. We send them a check in the mail at the same check that we would send our. Your current employees. Because why wouldn’t you?
Matt Alder [00:11:56]:
I want to come back and actually talk about the the recruitment process in a second, but just sort of run with this sort of content theme at the moment. So building up an alumni network using an appropriate platform, you sort of gave the example of, you know, McKinsey’s, who obviously have this kind of in the DNA of their organization. What about companies who’ve never done this before or don’t have that type of content? Other than job openings and the sort of latest corporate news, what works in content terms for keeping those alumni networks flowing?
Lee Caraher [00:12:34]:
So first, if you haven’t got a program, give yourself a break and start one. It’s easy, right? It’s easy just to decide. And you don’t have to get everybody who ever came through your company into the network tomorrow, right? Give yourself a year of Runway, if you will. First, you want to decide on your platform and I do. If you have over 500 people and I can send these to you, Matt, there are several off the shelf programs that you can use. I wouldn’t build my own unless you have that capability because you have to maintain it. Who are those people? Where are they? Are you connected on LinkedIn? So on your management team, everybody identifies 10 people that they would love to work with again, who came through their organizations. And so if you have 10 people in your management team, you ask them. 10, you already, you have 100 people and you go, you go and ask them. So you create the environment and then you send an email welcoming them to the alumni program in the content. Then what are you going to be giving to people? Like, what are you going to be offering to people so they would bother to be part of your alumni network? One is the ability to connect with each other, obviously. So in Facebook you would see who’s in the group. In any of these programs, you would see who’s in the group. Two is you would have corporate updates. Here’s what we’re all about. Here’s what we’re doing. Oh, and here, if you can, if it makes sense. And here’s a, here’s a discount for you as a former employee. Three, you would be giving training that you’re offering to your employees. And then four, really important, this is probably the most important thing is you’d be on a regular basis. So monthly basis you’d be highlighting one of your alumni. So, Matt, you used to work for me. Now you have your own company. You have this fabulous podcast. I’m going to dedicate a post to you. Let me tell you about Matt, who was at Double Forte five years ago and he left here as a account Whatever supervisor. And he’s gone on to do this wonderful thing. And here, you know, and I would have a form, basically an interview form that I would send to alumni where they’d upload their photo and give me some bio information and maybe I talk to them and I would post about my alumni. And I would do that on a monthly basis. So that’s, you know, if you do it once a month, it’s 12 profiles out of 100 people. Who cares, right? So it is content. It’s great content not only for your, your alumni, but it’s also great content for your employees. Because every employee who comes to you wants to know what’s possible by being employed by you. Like, what is possible. If I come here, what could I. What would I. What would I. Can I do? Not only what can I do in my own company, but what can I do after I pass through this company? Because there is not a person who’s coming to your employment who’s thinking, I’m 25, I’m going to be here until I’m 60. They’re not thinking that, but they want to know what’s possible. And if you can showcase your former employees in the alumni network so that they are getting that advantage, but also back into your company, you are really building your equity around the value of employment at your organization.
Matt Alder [00:15:50]:
Fantastic. Some brilliant advice there. Coming back to the recruiting and the recruitment process, you know, you mentioned that obviously you’re getting a lot of, you know, referrals and, you know, but sorry, both boomerang hires and referrals from alumni, you know, coming into your organization, what do you offer? A kind of a different recruitment process and a different candidate experience for, for people coming through that channel, for the.
Lee Caraher [00:16:17]:
People who worked here before? Yes, we do. If people are interested in talking to us about a position that we post, they go right to the top of the line and they sort of. They jump. They jump over any screening process and they go right to the top of the line with the hiring manager. And they are. So they don’t have to do all that vetting. So they probably are, you know, cutting three or four weeks out of that process, depending on where we are in the process. It is not a done deal. Like, if you just say you want to come back and you look like you, it’s not a done deal that you get the job. But we want to have the preferential treatment to the people who have been with us before who are raising their hand so that we can have a good conversation about does it make Sense, are they at the right end of the S curve for this new job? Are they just retracting? Whatever the reason is, they want to come back and does it make sense at this moment in time? And sometimes it doesn’t make sense at all. The person may not be happy in their current job, but the job we have open doesn’t make sense for them or for us to take. But what we try to do is give that preferential treatment. So because they have already been here and we know that we would want them because if they’re in our network, then they are boomerang eligible. Not everybody is of course, you know, boomerang eligible. So we do do that. If someone comes to us through an alumni person, we do fast track them to. For we, depending on the level of the person, we do fast track them for screening so they would have a leg up on timing from somebody else. And of course they’re coming in with a, you know, an endorsement, which always helps because in the end, you know, everybody who used to work here, they know what we’re looking for. They don’t want to have a bad rep of, oh my God, you sent me another dud. And therefore we’d never talk to you. You know, we wouldn’t take those duds again. And people who have worked here before totally understand what we’re looking for, totally understand our process. And they only send us literally never had a person be referred to us that wasn’t eminently qualified in multiple ways. We didn’t, weren’t always able to take everybody because we had more people referred than we had positions, but never had, had a bad candidate referred by a former employee.
Matt Alder [00:18:41]:
So obviously, you know, a key, a key part of this is, you know, making people want to come back in the first place. So, you know, in order for them to return to an organ, they’ve obviously had to have had a great experience while they were there and really kind of buy into the brand of that organization. What are your thoughts on that? How should employers make sure that people want to join them again in the future?
Lee Caraher [00:19:09]:
High performing cultures and you really have to put that high performing in there because give me a great culture and not get anything done, it’s not going to bode well for your business. High performing cultures are ones that hit their mark, have high expectations for performance, have high expectations for behavior among people, are highly respectful and are cultures of context so everyone knows what they’re doing and why, and their cultures of appreciation so everyone understands not only what their role is, but that their role is appreciated over time. When you have a culture of appreciation, context, and high performance and high expectations, you know, your company is proud, probably hitting it. You know, you’re probably killing it, actually, in terms of the way you have teams performing together, the behaviors that are happening in that organization. So when you go out into the world and so you’ve come. Imagine I’ve come to the company. I’ve. Man, I’ve had a great opportunity here, and I want to change my career entirely. But I came here as a public relations professional, and I want to now be a podcaster. Well, we don’t have podcasting here. I’ve been on some podcasts, but now I want to be a professional podcaster. Well, I’m not going to do it here at my company, but you’ve opened my eyes to it. I go out into the world and I become a professional podcaster. That is hard work. You are sort of alone in the world on that. You’re talking to a lot of people, but you’re sort of in a room with padding in it. I mean, seriously. And you learn lots of things, and then you become great at that over time. And then you’re thinking about, oh, what’s next? Oh, I think I want to do whatever. You know, maybe what I can do is marry my podcasting experience with the public relations experience. And you think, oh, that’s a good opportunity. Now time has passed. Where I went, where I was before has this opportunity. And I think that, you know, one is depending on your time in your life, you might say, I can go sell this idea to my former employee, or I can look out else in the world. And I think what we find is that people will highly value a former good experience as they think about advancing their career in a different way. Because the shortcut that you have with people around culture and even knowing where the bathrooms are is great. When you are at the bottom of an s curve of learning for a new position, if it wasn’t a good experience, people won’t even bother thinking about you. So it’s not about, you know, you focus on creating that good experience, be open to having people return to you, and then you can, you know, you can leverage both of those things together.
Matt Alder [00:22:03]:
So, final question. You know, you’re someone who obviously observes and experiences and writes about work a lot. Lots and lots of talk about what the future of work might look like. What do you think we’re in store for when it comes to work in the next five years? How are things going to change further?
Lee Caraher [00:22:23]:
Wow. Well, Things are changing so fast. There isn’t a career that’s not or an industry that’s not being upended by so many things. Technical AI, machine learning. I’ve done a lot of reading about this lately and I think that one is we need to make sure that we’re all relevant and the ability to learn is going to be highly prized. Highly highly prized. The ability to understand the acceptance of constant change is a non negotiable today. And those people who don’t want to learn new tricks are going to find themselves fast out of work. And I think that AI and machine learning, while it’s daunting and it feels like it’s just coming and it’s going to ruin all of our lives. I think that’s very, that’s misconstrued. AI is very good at very narrow applications. It is not good at very wide applications. Those things are connecting dots applications. It’s good at managing a dot, right? Please manage all these transactions in Excel. It’s great at that. But it’s not good at saying, okay, here’s the result of all that transactions. Here’s other information coming out of China. Here’s the I don’t give me some dots, right? And the human ability to connect dots is going to be more prized than anything else. So I think work is going to be more about learning. We are all going to have to be keeping ourselves relevant, not counting on our companies to keep us relevant. Although those companies that do help us keep relevant are going to be have an advantage over those that don’t and sort of knowing that it’s going to be different. Whatever you’re doing today is not what you’re going to be doing in five years.
Matt Alder [00:24:17]:
Lee, thank you very much for talking to me.
Lee Caraher [00:24:19]:
Matt, it’s been so great talking with you. Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:24:23]:
My thanks to Lee Caraher. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app which you can find by searching for recruiting future in your app store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
