Alumni—worth the effort of staying in touch?

By Alison Huntington

Thousands of bright-eyed graduates pass through the doors of the world’s leading consulting firms every year, but despite their initial excitement the reality is that they’re not all going to stay and climb the greasy pole until they’re made a partner. Many will go on to have glittering careers in industry, rising to the top of their chosen field and becoming clients of the very firms they used to work for.

What then, do these people think of their alma mater?

Every year we survey thousands of senior end-users of consulting services around the world as part of our client perception programme, asking each to tell us about three consulting firms they know best. In our latest research, 27%* of them identified themselves as potential clients of the firm they used to work for, and we’ve done a bit of digging into how their views differ from the rest of the respondents.

First off the bat, they’re less positive about the capability of their alma mater than are clients who are actually and currently working with the firm (who we call “direct clients”): of the 17 firms we asked about globally, just under half (49%) of alumni describe the quality of the firms they used to work at positively. It’s not out of line with other prospective clients (people who have seen consulting firms working within their organisation, or know a firm by reputation), but it’s a much lower share than direct clients (65% of this group speak positively about quality). Funny, eh? You might have thought that some sense of pride in the work they used to do might boost scores here. Perhaps they look back on their consulting days and remember endless last minute changes, late nights, and the difficult decisions that consultants deal with daily, and conclude that things could have been done better. Such is life.

But what they’re far more positive about is the value added by their former employer—far more so, in fact, than any other group of clients. Almost half (46%) say they think the firm they used to work at delivers more in value than it charges in fees, compared with just over a third of all other clients, direct or prospective. Here it’s difficult to tell if it’s self-flattery or self-pity that’s coming into play; the need to believe—to protect either ego or sanity—that all the pain of those stressful projects was worth it in the end.

Of course it could be that alumni have deeply internalised the messages of their onboarding about always adding value. I remember being told sternly as a graduate that whenever I was doing anything, I must always ask myself if it’s adding value, without anyone ever explaining what adding value actually constituted. Unexpected extra slide decks? Getting a coffee for the client? Staying so late the lights switch off around you? So most of the time it was a self-congratulatory exercise in asking myself that question, deciding that I definitely must be adding value, and then just getting on with whatever firefighting was at hand. That value is often such a woolly, ill-defined notion within firms probably plays a huge role in consultants’ failure to articulate it to clients.

I digress. What’s probably of most interest to consulting firms is this question: are the alumni of your firms your champions once they’ve left? Are they putting your firm’s name out there as a business partner when they run into the inevitable issues that all organisations come up against? The answer is mixed. 54% of alumni of the global firms we asked about say they have recommended the firm they used to work for. On the face of it, that’s a great result, but it also means there’s 46% who say they haven’t, and presumably, they’ve had ample opportunity to do so. It’s possible, then, that alumni are a more polarised bunch once they’ve decided to leave a firm.

Are alumni networks worth it? On the basis that over half go on to recommend the firms they worked in, the answer is probably yes. Are firms doing it right? My limited experience is that it’s largely restricted to a quarterly corporate email, with boring messages about how former snotty-nosed graduate Dave Smith is terribly important now, and Joe Bloggs had a wonderful sabbatical sailing around the world single-handedly for charity and is even more engaged in his role as a financial consultant now that he’s returned. But could firms do more to exploit the relationships they have with this group? Definitely.

*Based on data gathered in December 2015 about 17 firms we asked about globally, as indeed are all the figures in this blog.